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Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors
goombah99 writes "Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has posted a series of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting machines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and the origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well-printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to mount an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines."
Paper Ballots - Paper Ballots - PAPER BALLOTS!
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
... How hard can it be?
Seriously, how hard?
Someone presses a button and a counter gets incremented. Big whoop.
Any error at all in a programming exercise that goddamn simple is evidence enough for me to call for a full on corruption investigation.
public boolean IsVoteTallyCorrect()
{
return true;
}
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
"Princeton Professor, Ed Felton was arrested today for violation of the DMCA..."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
see another story about vote machine problems. If it was a NASA rocket motor there would be congressional investigations, news people camped out waiting for news of the investigation at NASA headquarters etc.
But this gets shoved under the carpet at every turn like a bit of dirt that not even MSM wants to report on.
It makes me sad to be American, well, sad that such things happen in America. We are supposed to be better than this. We were (I think) and I hope that we are better than this soon. It's disgusting.
The machines themselves are not complex pieces of equipment that take rocket scientists to develop or maintain. According to someone that should know, they are not even as secure as an ATM machine. How fucking sad is that?
Why, yes, I do have some suggestions. Where is the forum for me to submit them?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Right now they have a matching grant challenge, so nows a good time to offer cash. But think about also being an advocate in your state for getting the laws to allow this system.
OVC not only has open code but it also has an open bussiness model. They won't require you use it on any hardware they offer. It runs fine on off the shelf equipment. Any company could use the code, states could use the code. OVC would simply maintain it and certify that it is being deployed correctly.
Open voting solutions is another open source project with a different bussiness model but open code.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I can't believe that people STILL don't understand what is wrong with a receipt of how you voted that you remove from the polling place.
Boss: "Show me your receipt for candidate X tomorrow or don't bother showing up"
Husband: "Show me your receipt for candidate X tomorrow or it will be painful"
Creepy Person outside polling place: "Show me your receipt for candidate X and I will give you $10"
Yes, a paper trail is important, but one that you can refer to outside the polling place has very different problems.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Troll month. hehe. It is troll Tuesday, though.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Look.
These machines are intended and designed to prop-up the parlour-game of democratic basis for American government. They are not meant to "work". They are meant to reduce the definition of "democracy" to merely "voting" for the general public - and then to manage that vote. If they decrease the confidence of a certain segment of the public in the whole process, then they are also serving their secondary purpose: The devolution of the US to Banana Republic status.
The coup was completed in 2000. The dramatic operations began 40 years earlier, but it took awhile.
You don't see this. You think you still live in the same country that you were born in, that you attended Elementary School in, that you call the same name.
But it just isn't true. Visitors to your country get it in a very short time - but most of them clamp their mouths shut - it is quickly apparent that Americans are uncomprehending.
This isn't just Republicans. Sure - the Republican leaders are the sharp and shiny spear-tip, slicing the American side. The Democrats are just as on board - the solid wooden shaft, following this through the body. The elite of these - Cheney's and Pelosi's - will keep their mansions and their millions, their holidays in Vail and Sun Valley.
They will never join the people who "voted". That would be to join Dr. King, or Mel Carnahan.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
In this case there are almost certainly multiple errors, one of which is the design error sequoia explained that causes the wrong ballot to be recorded.
Another plausible error mode here is the one the ES&S ivotronics had (and ones with old firmware still have). Certified voting machines are required to redundantly store the votes, usually 3 times, and there may be some effort to have these in different memory modules.
A while back ES&S had a bug that was triggered by a low battery voltage. The low battery condition would cause the logger to report this in the log. However the log entry was too long and cause a buffer over flow that over wrote the header of one of the redudant vote files. When the votes were read out at the precinct the machine did not notice the corrupt header and a second programming bug caused the malformed headers to cause other problems including mis-reported various things (like the maching ID) which then caused all sorts of downstream problems.
When the votes were read out by another method the corruption of the primary vote file was detected and it silently failed over to the secondary record. This produced a vote report that did not match up with the first one.
A reveiew of multiple systems was done by the Florida election supervisor who estimated about 1 in 7 machines reported wrong. He was fired.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
OVC is not merely yet another touchscreen. It's a different kind of voting system. It's procedures are straighforward and simple yet at first blush may seem overly elaborate. In fact each of the seemingly simple steps in the process is a result of long deliberation by many voting system and security experts to foreclose various error modes and attack modes (e.g. chain voting, or secret ballot violations) while not making something too complex to operate and maintain. It also has to fail in a safe mode and be robust against operator error.
Here's the process:
1) voter makes selections on a touchscreen. These are recorded but this is NOT a cast ballot or a record of the vote.
2) computer prints out a paper summary ballot of the voters choices in an easy to read ballot-like format
3) also along the edge is a 1-D barcode encoding the selections in an obfuscated but not encrypted format.
4) voter can now cast this ballot by depositing it in a metal box. Or they can tear it up and ask to vote again. or they can walk out with the ballot if they like (it's not cast unless deposited so it's not a "receipt").
6) After polls close, witnesses and the election judge unseal the box, and hand shuffle the ballots to destroy any residual vote order.
7) then election workers, use a bar code wand to scan every ballot. As it is scanned the ballot is recreated on screen and the judge can compare any ballot she chooses to the paper copy. (this provides one of many random checks on the fidelity of the bar code)
8) as each ballot is scanned, the computer also checks the ballot creation record of the ballot generating machines. Every ballot must have a valid ballot creation session that matches the paper ballot. (the reverse is not true--there will be more ballot creation sessions than actually cast ballots since some ballots were discarded or taken and revoted.) This step is a partial safeguard against ballot stuffing, since an attacker will now have to modify many records and witness accounts to change the ballots (alter the machine records, alter the paper ballots, alter the turned in ballots, etc... And alter various anti-forgery measures)
Nice features:
1) nothing forecloses hand counting the paper in a recount since it's the official ballot not the electronic record or the bar code.
2) the untrusting voter can take the printed ballot to a third, un-netowrked machine to read the barcode back to him to see that it matches. Or she can leave with it and take it outside to some place that will also do this (say the ACLU or the Green party might have a booth set up offering this) Or she could take a cell -phone picture and decode it using some bar-code reader on the web. etc.....
It's a good test because even a single failure leaves the voter with deomstable official proof of an error. And it's robust because an error in the bar code discovered late in the process does not screw the election--you can still recount the paper ballots text.
3) the bar code is made 1D and short, deliberately so that it is information strarved. There can't be any diaboloical things hidden in it, like the voters identity or ways to tell other stand alone scanners to collude in what they tell the voter is in it. Also it allows very low tech equipment to read it (cue-cats wands $5)
As can be seen theres many onion layers to the security model. It's not depeneding of fool proof steps to remain that way. It's robust against operator error.
Additional features are that the touch screen can be just a commodity computer. it boots off an un mutable cdrom not a disk drive. So after the elections you can simply discard the computers. That is, give them to schools or state agencies or sell them on e-bay. These are not sophisticated voting machines. This frees up the monies normally used for secure storage and maintainece.
Since the voting terminals are cheap you can have many of them to avoid lines or problems with machine failure.
Since t
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.