Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year

MozeeToby writes "The Columbus Dispatch is reporting on a criminal investigation currently being performed in Franklin County Ohio. It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn't. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate's name was back on the ballot. Normally, we could dismiss this as confusion or a mistake on the part of the voter(s) who noticed it. In this case, the person who first noticed the discrepancy was Ohio Secretary of state Jennifer Brunner. Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the ballot. Naturally, the county board remains skeptical of these accusations."

Comments

Skeptical?

[SatanicPuppy]

These morons can't even program their VCRs and they're skeptical of tampering? I vote at a place where the people running the polls were alive when the results would have been passed using goddamn pony express, and they say the same crap here.

We seriously need to toss this crap in a landfill and go back to paper. Any idiot can figure out a paper system, and the system should have that sort of transparency.

Never leave a paper trail

[MisterSquirrel]

Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the balot. Because we all know what a vastly time-consuming task turning on logging during setup must be.

You can't make this stuff up...

[TripMaster Monkey]

Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the balot [SIC].

Unbelievable. It's like they're trying to make the machines as unreliable and untrustworthy as possible. I know that the problem of properly implementing electronic voting machines is not a simple one by any means, but this is just plain ridiculous.

Re:You can't make this stuff up...

[Drakin020]

It's better than when Diebold leaked the election results. http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks

Re:You can't make this stuff up...

[0xABADC0DA]

...problem of properly implementing electronic voting machines... There is no proper implementation for an electronic voting machine.

There can be proper vote printing machines.
There can be proper vote tabulating machines.

But the same device can never do both properly.
The votes must be inspectable by humans between these steps.
EOT.

Related story

[TripMaster Monkey]

If you're not yet completely convinced that the electronic voting currently being rolled out is a craptastic idea, here's a little story on how a simple malformed URL can get the online voting registration page in Pennsylvania to yield other voters' registration files on demand.

Re:Damn

[Kandenshi]

Make sure you bring me your receipt showing you voted for my uncle Tony or else your thumbs and you will be spending some time apart.

Ohio

[Anivair]

I hate my state. On election night of the last election we almost immediately found a district near me where they had registered more voted for Bush than existed in the whole county. Gotta love when they're obvious.

Re:Heh.

[rucs_hack]

The problem is that paper based elections are no more secure, and if the physical ballots are lost, you're screwed. Accidents do happen, so you can't say they never would be. We need a better voting system that takes advantage of our new computing technology.

I'm not saying that the current electronic systems are a good idea though.

The primary flaw of the currently available voting machines is that they are all proprietary. This means a company has a commercial interest in hiding flaws, and is more likely to push out a device with flaws (or fight to prevent their discovery), if they convince themselves that fixing the flaws isn't worth it, in view of the profit reduction that would result.

We need a voting machine system which is impartial, and not run as a for profit exercise.

I think the best method would be to set up a consortium of major technology corporations to create the voting machines, and have them run it as a tax break, with rental fee's going to charities, not to the corporations themselves. After all, they have all the smart people working for them, and if profit is not a factor, and no single company has control, the system is less likely to be flawed.

Before anyone starts foaming at the mouth about big companies I say this. They already run your health system, your financial institutions, your currency, transportation systems, and your food supply. It's not such a big leap.
Plus, co-operation is already happening with software technology.

Re:Heh.

[Chandon Seldon]

The problem is that paper based elections are no more secure, and if the physical ballots are lost, you're screwed.

They aren't? How many man-seconds alone with the ballots does it take to change the result of a paper election by editing the ballots? How many cubic meters of stuff do you need to carry to swap in forged ballots? Now how about electronically stored ballots?

A secured voting system?

[rmdyer]

Maybe I'm wrong (please feel free to correct me if I am), but is it not possible to create some kind of secured voting system based on methods of cryptographic techniques that would allow the following properies of a voting system...

a. Your vote can be cast without anybody else knowing who you voted for.
b. At any point in time after you cast your vote, you can verfiy that your
        vote is counted with the candidate you voted for.
c. The government can "verify" that you voted.
d. You can vote over the internet.
e. Only one vote per citizen.
f. Any cheating is immediately detected.
g. others where needed and appropriate.

I'm wondering if some kind of one time pads could be generated by all parties involved, combined togther with public key cryptography, that would allow such a system.

It boggles the mind that more effort and resources are put into making sure the government gets their tax returns than whether the voting system works or not.

Why should I vote again?

Re:A secured voting system?

[corsec67]

Any system where a person can verify their vote after it has been cast is open to a very real kind of attack:

"Vote for #{my_candidate} or you are fired. Signed, your boss"
Or, husband, wife, mother, creepy guy standing outside the polling place, etc.

Re:A secured voting system?

[SEAL]

I'm wondering if some kind of one time pads could be generated by all parties involved, combined togther with public key cryptography, that would allow such a system. Don't throw pseudo-cryptographic nonsense into it. The problem is a human one; it cannot be solved purely by technology.

You have a task that gathers data from many sources, and needs to verify the identity of those sources. Many people and groups will try to attack, corrupt or undermine that data. Furthermore, any verification in place to detect and prevent such attacks can also be considered vulnerable, but ALSO gets saddled with a deadline as laws in many states prevent recounts after a brief timespan.

The "attacks" could be purely technological -- (subvert the software), all the way to social (have poll workers set up certain locations in a way that delays people who are waiting to vote in areas that tend to be against your candidate).

People speak of the importance of a paper trail, but that merely diverts the point of vulnerability. How do we detect that a recount is needed in the first place? Who is doing the recount? How do we know it is any better than the first count?

Re:A secured voting system?

[ardent99]

This is exactly right. All voting technologies, paper or electronic, will have vulnerabilities. The way to solve this problem is to have enough redundancy in the system that makes it very difficult for all mechanisms to fail, or be corrupted, simultaneously and similarly. We have learned this lesson from building fault-tolerant computer systems, and need to apply it here, too. We also need to include the human element in the fault-tolerant design, as people are also subject to failure and corruption.

For example, you could make a system that has simultaneous redundant and different technologies, such as both electronic and paper trails. Then each of these subsystems could have their information flows be split at the source and channeled through completely different paths to different counters. There could be multiple sets of people with different political allegiances doing redundant counting. With this kind of system failures would be discovered, and could be tracked back to their sources. This kind of redundancy would cost more, but it could be done pretty straightforwardly if it is really what people wanted.

The main problem of course and it is the big one, is that it is not clear that the authorities actually WANT the system to be incorruptible. There are a huge number of power plays that go on in government, and the bigger the election, the more power is involved. There is so much back-room bargaining, lobbying, and cronyism, both within government and between government and big business, that the people in power don't really want transparency and fault-tolerance because it would interfere with their power. Fair voting only helps the little people, not the people who are already in power, and the system can only be changed by the people in power.

Re:Heh.

[ArcherB]

They aren't? How many man-seconds alone with the ballots does it take to change the result of a paper election by editing the ballots? You mean to print ballots that are pre-filled out? I could print about one a second. Not that this matters as I could do it at my leisure.

How many cubic meters of stuff do you need to carry to swap in forged ballots? If I pre-stuff the box with my pre-printed ballots before the polls even open... Zero. If you swap the ballot box out after the polling and dispose of the original, then you need a replica of the box.

Now how about electronically stored ballots? Well, since you need physical access to the machines since they are not on the network, this could take a while. Once you get access, how long to upload whatever changes you want to make could take a while. Of course, you also have to make sure to clear all logs of your access and try to make sure that any changes you made are not detected by something as simple as MD5SUM on pre-polling files.

Sorry to say it but any retard can stuff a paper ballot box. It takes an experienced hacker to hack an electronic election.

Personally, I feel that an electronic voting machine should print out a serial numbered, easy to read paper ballot that you have to drop into the box before you leave. Now you have the best of both worlds. If the electronic numbers do not match what is in the paper ballot box, investigate. Each serial numbered ballot should have a corresponding electric vote. Now to steal this kind of election, you'd need to stuff the ballot box with votes that are actually in the machines memory. Not impossible to hack, but much more difficult that hacking either a paper or electronic system alone.

Ohio Voting machines are officially a crime scene

[Geoffrey.landis]

Ohio Voting machines are now officially a crime scene.

Or ARs technica

Re:Heh.

[SatanicPuppy]

These P.O.S machines didn't even have logging turned on. Fraud, no fraud, it'd be impossible to tell.

And while it may take an experienced person to write an exploit, it only takes a "retard" to load it.

Monkeying physical ballots can be done, sure. But you need a lot of people to do it. You need the poll workers, you need the ballot printers, you need the ballot box movers...And all this is for a polling place that may only serve a few hundred people. Now multiply that by the millions of voters in a general election. One person can keep a secret. A hundred? A thousand? Never.

Re:Heh.

[dgatwood]

We need a better voting system that takes advantage of our new computing technology.

I have a pretty good idea where you'd begin.

• Two stations that must conform to a set standard and may not be built by the same vendor in any polling place.
• First station casts the vote, second station allows you to verify it. Both count the votes independently and report back independently to separate counting systems built again by separate vendors.
• The voting station must generate a unique symmetric key that must be registered upstream to the backend counting system, but may not be recorded on the vote token. That backend must then make it available to any other counting system that asks. Appropriate cryptographic protection must be used to ensure no unauthorized system can ask.
• The checking station must then request that key to decrypt the vote for verification purposes.
• If the vote verification shows that the vote was incorrect, the user cancels the vote and, upon returning to the voting station, revotes. The cancellation is propagated back to the voting station by the transportation of the vote token as a negative vote.
• After voting, you retain your voting token, and can connect it to a USB port (or a flash card reader, perhaps) and run a program that queries the vote counting system. Because the encrypted vote is still present, the servers can each independently verify whether the vote was, in fact cast. This path should not allow access to the key needed to decrypt the vote, however, thus preventing people from using this as a way to sell votes.

Of course, the security would still depend on the standards being defined by a group of people familiar enough with crypto to come up with a robust and reasonably secure standard for doing all this, but at least by requiring independent verification, this significantly reduces the likelihood of vendors being bought off successfully without getting caught, and by allowing vote counts to be verified independently after the fact against all of the counting servers, this significantly reduces the ways in which blocks of votes can get "lost" by corrupt election officials.

Re:Heh.

[SatanicPuppy]

Ever been to a polling place where they didn't check to see if you were a registered voter? When that polling place has a record of serving 5000 registered voters and no ballots to show for it, that is a pretty clear indication of fraud, don't you think?

Pardon the pun, but paper ballots leave a huge paper trail. They're physical objects; they exist, and therefore it is much harder to make them disappear than it is an ephemeral digital record.

I have to agree with the puppy on this one.

[khasim]

This mythical "retard" who is somehow a management/distribution savant?

More correctly stated, any "retard" can stuff a ballot box ... and be caught doing so.

It's like saying that any "retard" can rob a bank but it takes a skilled hacker to electronically loot your accounts. It is just wrong. It is far easier to secure a physical object because people have far more experience with doing just that.

Archer seems to be postulating a perfect scenario for electronic voting. Just read TFA and the others like it.

Re:Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they were Diebold machines, all of that is under 10 seconds. You can swap out the memory card without breaking the seals. Wireless networking is often enabled, so you can just sit in the parking lot. (Why in the name of all that is holy do these things have *wireless* capability?) Logging is done using a MS Access database. (Read 'editable without trace'.) Two sets of totals are kept: One for spot checks and one for the final total. They are never compared. If you have a swipe card with the master password, (leaked to the net quite a while ago) you can gain admin access from the touch screen. Difficulty? George Bush could do it.

Re:Heh.

[moderatorrater]

Dated myself You shouldn't do that, it makes God cry.

Re:Heh.

[SatanicPuppy]

Uh..."Satanicpuppy"

Just sayin...