New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected

TechDirt is reporting that the New Jersey e-voting troubles are even worse than originally thought. Apparently the "minor bug" which was supposed to be fixed is still not corrected, suggesting that Sequoia still doesn't know what is going on. "Ed Felten has received a bunch of 'summary tapes' from the last election in New Jersey, and while many of them do have the vote totals matching up correctly at the end at least two of the summary tapes simply don't add up, meaning that Sequoia's explanation of what went wrong is incorrect. Given how often the company has denied or hidden errors in its machines, despite a ton of evidence, we shouldn't be surprised that it was inaccurate in explaining away this latest problem as well. However, we should be outraged that the company refuses to allow third party researchers to investigate these machines. It's a travesty that any government would use them when they've been shown to have so many problems and the company is unwilling to allow an independent investigation."

Comments

where are the whistleblowers?

[mcmonkey]

So many stories have "the company did this" or "the company denied that." Aren't these companies made up of people?

I can imagine an effort by management to cut corners and maximize profits at the expense of quality and company reputation, but is there really no one in a position of first hand knowledge who knows better?

With the multitudes of avenues for anonymous communications, it's not like I'm asking someone to put their job on the line. (Not that it would be too much to ask. There are people out there risking their lives in a very real way to protect this country. You won't even risk a job you most likely hate anyway?)

Man...

[Copley]

Your country's elections are screwed up!

How'd your elections get to be such a mess?! USA - the 'bastion' of democracy, and you can't even organise a fair, verifiable election.

You might want to take a quick look at how so many other nations manage with just paper ballots and pens. Don't forget kids, K.I.S.S.!

Re:Man...

[sumdumass]

It isn't really all that screwed up. But we do have a few problems. First is that each state (province in most other countries) decide how to have their elections independent of the federal government. Then you have situations where someone demands that fraud happened because their guy lost and they aren't willing to accept that. So you get state governments wanting to figure out how to look like their going to do something to compensate for what really amounts to stupid citizens and here comes all the companies with plans to make them money.

So know you have politicians who think something needs to be done, companies lobbying them thinking they can make a buck, and when they do, it isn't enough, they have to cut corners, which then turns the same sour puss crowd that turns it into a We gotta do something again message that perpetuates the companies claiming give us more money and we can fix it.

The problem is that it is getting represented as worse then it is. There might have been a few problems here and there but the major ones you hear about are more or less citizen errors. Things like claiming disenfranchisement because someone passed out a flyer saying Vote on X day if your voting republican and vote on Y day if your voting for a democrat (ohio), people claiming disenfranchisement because cops are parked in the medium strip watching traffic 4 or 5 blocks away from a polling place, or that they couldn't figure out how to line up their cards properly and look to see if a hole was actually made on certain selections (florida). Now we have new jersey and Maryland where where Electronic voting seems to have made a couple of errors that would be somewhat par for the course if paper ballots where used anyways. But because it is electronic, it is receiving much more scrutiny.

In all, it isn't nearly as bad as it is being made out as. Still it isn't something that should be ignored either. The real interesting thing is that they areas having the problems seem to be more liberal in nature which is probably why you get the loud screaming if something doesn't go the way they hoped it would. (the perpetual underdog syndrome where we can raly the grass roots but claiming someone is mysteriously attempting to use the magic smoke in the decices to stop your vote from counting.)

Re:How hard can this be??

[Toonol]

There's one point this indirectly makes, though... I think this illustrates incompetency rather than fraud. It is was fraud, they would add up.

Is +1 really that hard for a computer to do?

[erroneus]

I think the number one reason people are suspecting corruption and election tampering is the idea that adding one (1) is somehow a complicated action to perform. And that is the basic operational notion behind voting after all.

But why aren't people outraged? I think it's because we, the people, don't believe our votes count anyway and so none of this comes as a surprise. There may have been a time when men with pistols and rifles might gather and demand a recount, but guess what? We don't have gun ownership any more... at least not the kind that we had in the past. And if a group of people with guns gathered together for just about any reason at all, I think the potential outcome would be easy to guess based on recent historical events.

I really don't think our votes count. They don't because of a variety of reasons prior to the ballot being printed. Independents don't stand a chance... even the people who are actually pretty well liked by most. The news media is incredibly biased. When debates are being held, lots of people are simply not allowed to even participate. Some states such as Texas even have laws that state you cannot participate in getting an independent on the ballot if you have voted in any party primaries. The end result is that we can "vote" for whoever we want... but the selection is more or less out of our hands.

If people really believed their votes counted, they would be outraged. The lack of rage is a pretty telling indication that the people aren't interested in voting irregularities in the least. If there were irregularities in their bank statements, their phone bill or their paychecks, they'd be outraged to the point of violence as is often the case when such issues occur. So if outrage is an indicator of how much someone cares when things go wrong, then I'd say people are more upset over [literally] spilled milk than they are over elections.

I'm a little surprised...

[crmarvin42]

that members of this site haven't started an open source project around developing an OS and maybe a basic hardware specification for cheap E-voting machines.

Considering how many people get upset every time some article like this comes up and the expertise many claim that this hasn't occurred to anyone yet. I'm no programmer (outside of incredibly simple perl scripts) so "I" couldn't do it but I can't imagine that members of the Slashdot community would do any worse than these asshats. Besides, even if they did do a crappy job it would be open source so that security hats could look through it and point to all of the bugs for fixing.

even they are buggy...

[Shivetya]

There have been a number of stories posted here and at Digg about payouts that were voided because of courts siding with casinos when they declared the winner only won because of a bug or the jackpot was wrong because of a bug.

So they aren't a great example.

Its not like either party wants it fixed, they do far better crying an election was stolen than do actual work.

It also gives them an out, elections are the ultimate ego bitch slap, its no fun when people don't vote for you and you lose, it means people didn't like you and that hurts

If only they really _had_ been stolen

[Sloppy]

the voting machines fell off the back of a truck .. which is why the state was able to get them "wholesale".

I get the joke, but..

One of the interesting things about the situation, is that New Jersey apparently does not own the machines. They neither stole nor bought them. They licensed the machines, and the terms of the license are what prohibits them from analyzing the flaws. Without the state signing a contract that prohibits them from auditing the machines, Sequoia would have had no muscle to prevent it, and Felten would have his hands on one by now.

What bothers me

[dj245]

What is really bugging me is that computers are great at counting and adding. ITS WHAT THEY DO! The fact that nobody can come up with a believable voting machine tells me something really rotten is going on. I could understand if they were having troubles with advanced CFD code making or some other complex process where the real-world results are not completely understood, but these machines are basically taking $NumVotesCast +1 many many times.

Re:What bothers me

[fredklein]

What is so goddamn hard about producing a simple, easy to use, secure, electronic voting machine/method?
Take a podium, put a mini-atx MB in a locked metal box under it, a touch-screen lcd on the top, and strap a printer to the side. The thing boots over the network from a server locked a cage in the corner of the room.
The software is not much more than a web page that displays the pictures/names of the candidates (or the text of referendums, etc), and allows you to touch the name/face of who you want.
The printer uses a big 2-ply roll of paper. The 'upper' copy is the receipt the voter can take. the 'lower' coppy is stored inthe printer as a journal.
I know what you're thinking- receipts are a problem, you can sell your vote, or your boss will threaten to fire you unless you show him a receipt for the candidate he likes. Not with this- there is no info on the receipt that links to a specific person, thus no way to prove it is 'your' receipt, and not one you picked up off the ground. All it contains is the voting machine ID number, the time (to the minute, nothing more required), and the votes, in both barcode and human-readable formats. Need a recount? Run the journal spool(s) thru a barcode scanner, and beep, beep ,beep, it counts the votes. Need a more in-depth recount? have humans look at the journal spool, and add the names up. As a final recount method, you can have voters return with their receipts for machine and human verification.
There, simple, safe, and secure. And not too expensive.

BSOD

[Anonymous Coward]

The first time I saw one of Sequoia's units was at a demonstration in Philadelphia about 3 years ago. At that time they were demonstrating a prototype as they didn't have the displays they intended to use. Half way through the demonstration, in true Bill Gates style, the device threw up that old familiar blue screen.
One thing to point out is that Sequoia, or at least some of the companies that it now owns, has a history in the voting machine industry. Remember those big blue mechanical booths with the sliding curtains? Those things were as inaccurate as hell.
The argument for paper is good, but in many elections there can be thousands of individual ballots in a single county. If you overcome the logistic hurdles, then you have the problem of people doing the counting of thousands of ballots and compiling that information. I've spent many election nights reviewing paperwork from precincts that was just wrong - didn't add up or was off by an order of magnitude. These weren't people trying to hedge an election; they just screwed up simple arithmetic.
I studied this problem for years from a security analyst's position. In my opinion, a print on demand, image, scan, and destroy solution is the only practical solution. Sorting and storing tons of paper just doesn't make sense. Recycle it. Use barcodes on the ballot, steganography in the stored image, and encryption in the scan record to verify the match of the scan and the stored image to the print at the polling place.
Let's face it, we have exactly what the original GW warned us about, a two party system where the political aristocracy selects the possible candidates based on the influence of lobbyists. Their machines are calibrated to select issues and positions to give a 50% bias within the uneducated masses.
As a Libertarian, all I can do is sit and watch in disgust. This not what our ancestors had in mind, but they only had (much less than) 0.3% as many ballots to count.

Re:BSOD

[Catbeller]

Canada solved their paper ballot problems long ago. At every voting station, people from each interested party watch a manual count of paper ballots after the elections is over. The tally is checked and phoned up, and the original paper is kept for recount and audits.

The system scales to national elections, and... they finish the count in three hours or so. The whole country. Manually. No Scantron, no PC's, no networks. Examine that system.

Our US system is designed to take a long time, and provide nearly infinite possibilities to alter the count. E-voting simply finished our cheatamatic system, putting all audit capabilities into the hands of private companies beholden to the Republican party, with predictable and awe-inspiring in-your-face fraud. No meatworld games need be played anymore; they can phone in a fix now. And the evidence shows they have. A *lot*.

Email thread from communications with Sequioa

[QuesarVII]

Let him know how you feel too! "Smith, Ed"

Here is my email thread with him-

Buttressed by the fact that the email I sent only to two professors has been distributed without my knowledge or consent, why would we allow analysis of our machines by unlicensed parties? We are not afraid of the results. In fact, as mentioned to you earlier, the report from the code review that is in progress goes to the State simultaneous to release to Sequoia.

Ed Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems

Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including all the attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and contains confidential information. Unauthorized use or disclosure is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not use, disclose, copy or disseminate this information. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message, including attachments.

-----Original Message-----
From: Name Withheld for Slashdot
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 3:55 PM
To: Smith, Ed
Subject: Re: why are you refusing an independent analysis

Just because you are not aware of Felton's test plan does not mean he does not have one. If there is nothing wrong for him to find, why is there a problem with him analyzing it? You keep ignoring this question.

Name Withheld for Slashdot
On Wednesday 19 March 2008, you wrote:
> The lack of a published Test Plan, stated objectives for the study,
> voting machines for study that have been secured since Election Day
> and other facts in evidence do not support your contention that this
> is a structured review.
>
> Ed Smith
> VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
> Sequoia Voting Systems
>
> Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including all the
> attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and
> contains confidential information. Unauthorized use or disclosure is
> prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not use,
> disclose, copy or disseminate this information. If you are not the
> intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately by reply
> email and destroy all copies of the original message, including
attachments.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Name Withheld for Slashdot
> Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 3:07 PM
> To: Smith, Ed
> Subject: Re: why are you refusing an independent analysis
>
> Mr Smith:
>
> This is not an "ad hoc" review. Felton is an expert in the field.
> Are you afraid he will turn up problems with your machines like he has

> with others in the past?
>
> Name Withheld for Slashdot
>
> On Wednesday 19 March 2008, you wrote:
> > Name Withheld for Slashdot:
> >
> > We are acting against only these ad hoc reviews. There is an
> > independent source code and functional review in progress at this
> > time, with results going to the NJ Attorney General's office. We
> > support reviews that protect both our intellectual property rights
> > and
> >
> > have donated staff hours and resources to the on-going review
> > mentioned above.
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Ed Smith
> > VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification Sequoia Voting Systems
> >
> > Confidentiality Notice: This email message, including all the
> > attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and
> > contains confidential information. Unauthorized use or disclosure is
> > prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not use,
> > disclose, copy or disseminate this information. If you are not the
> > intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately by reply
>

how hard could it be?

[ByTor-2112]

candidate->votes++;

Re:It's New Jersey...

[kesuki]

"If the state government maintains strict controls on slot machines and has access to the source code of slot machines....why the hell doesn't it have a better grasp on voting machines?!"

Just to be fair, people have died because they worked for a slot machine company (one that sold to bars, etc, in Nevada, where they have the same or similar laws) and were going to whistle blow (testify in court, witness protection and all that) on them about the fact that the company had forced them to work on two versions of source code. One version that the state got, and a special version they charged the bar $$$ for, that would make the machine skip it's top payout 50% of the time.

The company that sold these machines, and they hired a gunman to shoot the man dead, while he was in witness protection!