NY Legislature Rejects "Microsoft Amendment"

An anonymous reader writes "Finally, some good news on electronic voting. The New York state legislature rejected an amendment proposed by Microsoft's lobbyists which would have gutted New York's requirements for voting machine vendors to turn over their source code to the state Board of Elections. Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton commented: 'The voting machine vendors have known for two years what our laws said. Now they're saying that those parts of their systems using Microsoft software have to be proprietary? It's just wrong.'"

Comments

I don't want to rain on everyone's parade but.....

[putch]

the legislature didn't actually "reject" it. they just didnt pass it. and yes, they concluded their regularly scheduled legislative session last week. BUT, they're expected back for a "special" session in July, and the governor has implied that he will call them back several times.

students of the NYS legislature will also tell you that the "special" sessions tend to be when the sneakiest things go on in NYS because, in general, they garner less attention and most of the legislators just want to make it as quick as possible and get back to their families.

that being said, NY does have a very strong voting rights coalition with a number of very smart and talented people working very hard to make sure that this DOESNT go through.

one good thing did happen at the end of session. is that NYVV's (New Yorker's for Verified Voting) Bo Lipari (who's been leading the charge AGAINST microsoft's lobbyists) has been granted a seat at the table. the citizen's advisory board now has statutory authority. which means that when the board of elections makes decisions about this stuff he's got a seat at the table to help shape the outcome.

Re:Nothing to see here. Move along.

[lena_10326]

I click on them all the time. It's a deliciously satisfying way of transferring cold hard cash from Microsoft's wallet to Slashdot and Google.

And you're also diluting the CPA, which is the real measure of ad performance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_Per_Action

Of course, you by yourself won't have much impact but there would be if 1% of Slashdot's reader base did.

Re:no its not

[Original Replica]

In this particular case the risk of a trapdoor in the platform code is a lower concern than the risk of the running code being substituted on the final machine.

IANAProgrammer, But for this application neither is acceptable.
Given what the code is required to do (allow for the selection of a vote in each catagory, record said votes, provide totals for each catagory) shouldn't the code be blindingly simple? Give me ANSI graphics and no mouse driver. Give me three imputs: cursor up, cursor down, enter/select. Hell, it can print out on a dot matrix. It should be a requirement that the code be small enough to be reviewed completely, without excessive effort.

Re:no its not

[KlomDark]

There's a better system than that - your vote is stored in a database, but your vote is also printed out for you to review. You then put the paper in a box that is kept under lock and key. For quick results, the database count is the one that is looked at. However, any third party can request to count the paper votes and compare them to the database count. If they do not match, then there is a physical audit trail to show that someone was monkeying with the software. This way, we get fast results, and verification.

Trust, then verify, is the solution in this case.

Risk analysis

[grcumb]

So the only reason someone would disagree with your point of view is that they are paid to do so?

Without agreeing with the rhetorical gist of the GP, I believe the point being made was that the suggestion was so absurd that nobody would put it forward unless they were paid to do so.

I disagree with that premise, but I do agree that obscuring any aspect of a voting system that is being used to decide, among other things, the next president of the United Sates is the height of folly.

Security is risk control, not risk elimination. In this particular case the risk of a trapdoor in the platform code is a lower concern than the risk of the running code being substituted on the final machine.

Risk is measured as a combination of:

• How easy it is to attack using a particular vector;
• What the payoff will be for the attacker;
• What the cost will be to the defender if the exploit succeeds;
• What the cost of securing that vector is.

In this case, the prize is political control of the most powerful nation in the world. So we need to ask ourselves: How much are fair and free elections worth? What, in effect, is the price of the democratic process in the US?

I think it's worth billions of dollars. That means stringent code review, impeccable chain of custody and constant supervision. Saving a few bucks by using an off-the-shelf operating system - especially one that is orders of magnitude more complex than what is actually required - that's absurd, in my opinion.

Re:no its not

[nschubach]

Doesn't the Microsoft EULA state that their OS is not to be used in mission critical applications or applications where the lives of people could be at risk anyway? I remember reading that on the NT4 EULA. Not sure if it remained in the text...

Simplify the hardware

[Stephen Ma]

Simplify the hardware; you don't need the latest, fanciest CPU if all you want to do is count.

Buy a batch of Z-80s or even 8080s; they are still being made. The design is so old that it's unlikely to have been compromised; but if you are really paranoid, the circuitry of an 8-bit CPU is simple enough that you could easily verify it by hand. Build a little voting box around one of those chips, and you're done.

The design would take half a year and cost less than a $1 million -- which is peanuts when the goal is to ensure the honesty of a democracy's most important event.