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How To Spot E-Vote Tampering?
Precinct Election Judge writes "I am one of the Republican Party Precinct Chairs in Harris County, Texas. Since in 2006 Republican Rick Perry won the Governor's race in my precinct I will be the head election judge at my polling station this November. (My Democratic counterpart will be assistant election judge.) I have read with interest the stories about voting machine hacking, and I want advice from those of you who are experts on what to watch for to make sure there is no fraudulent activity at my precinct during the election. What activities should I look for? Keep in mind my restrictions: I will be at a table in the front of the room with the voter rolls signing people in, I can only approach the voting machines if a voter asks a question or if I have strong reason to believe there is fraudulent activity, the last thing I need is for someone to say the Republicans are trying to keep people from voting! And finally, although each station and voter will be visible from my seat each machine has 'blinders' around it so I will most likely not be able to see the hands of each voter while they are at the station. Thank you in advance for all suggestions."
Does your E-Vote equipment produce a voter verifieable paper trail?
If it doesn't have a paper trail, ask yourself why.
That's the hard part about e-voting. It's hard to tell when something fraudulent is happening. With pen and paper, human counted voting, it's easy to watch to ballot box to ensure it's empty when you start, that no extra votes are deposited, and that all votes are counted properly. With computers, it's hard for people to actually watch and see what's going on. You could probably swap out the entire insides of a voting machine, make it work completely differently, yet look exactly the same, without anybody noticing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If the machine says Diebold on it, there's a good chance it has been tampered with.
1. What kind of equipment will you be using?
There are a number of models which have been shown to be tamperable with no evidence of tampering available at the time of voting. Step 1 is to make sure you aren't using any of these machines.
I think you should be more concerned with malfunctioning e-voting systems, in particular situations where the voter believes his/her vote has been recorded as intended, but the final tallies do not reflect the voter's intent.
A good way to achieve this is to have a verifiable record of the votes cast.
As far as hacking, you should probably seal the machines with strong tape, including any keyholes, ports, access panels. This would make it easier for you to detect someone tampering with a machine, due to the increased effort required to do so. It also would make it more difficult to tamper with the machine without leaving a trace.
The system is set-up to PREVENT voters from fraud. Even on the electronics, it is set-up. Any issue will almost certainly be out of your control. The real problem with the electronics is that the COMPANY who built and service it can commit fraud. And it is next to impossible to detect. All a politician has to do is pay off somebody up high and then the company will do things like last minute software updates in warehouses, that were post inspection. Sadly, it is easy to do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1. Verify that you're using electronic voting machines.
2. You cannot verify the voting machine itself.
3. Elections are fraudulent without transparency.
I maintain that the whole concept of electronic voting machines is so idiotic that anyone who doesn't realise what using one means, is in effect giving up his/her right to vote.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
(In other words, I'm a Democrat striving for civility.) I would suggest to you that most types of fraudulent activity will take place where you can't see them--that is, not in your presence. These machines have a lot of vulnerabilities, and it's not necessary to stand there and tamper with them while you are pretending to vote. My first thought on being confronted with one of Maryland's soon-to-be-vanished Diebold systems was that I could have brought in a pocket full of cards containing whatever I wanted them to contain. Assuming that your jurisdiction is still making gestures towards the secrecy of the ballot (via the privacy screens), you and your counterpart wouldn't even see that. I suppose that the poll watcher/election judge/whoever who is assigned to escort voters to the machines and get them started could watch for clumsy fraudsters dropping extra cards out of their pockets. Aside from that, if the fraud happens, you won't see it.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
There is a standard, well developed way to determine if a ballot has been rigged. Tampering with e-voting machines is just the most modern technique, in the past people have stuffed ballot boxes or simply lied about the results. Easy stuff.
So, standard solution: ask the people as they leave the polling station.
This is called an "exit poll" and it's remarkably accurate. Except of course in the last couple of elections in the USA, where the exit polls utterly failed, especially in districts that had new shiny e-voting machines with no paper trail.
My blog
If it is tampered with, it is probably going to before you ever see it. Your watch is not a good target. Too many people and a single hacked machine or two will stand out like a sore thumb to statistical analysis. Much better to get at a bunch of them while they are waiting to be distributed to the polling stations.
Are you even an interesting target? Would a 2% shading of your numbers change cascading electoral numbers? The perfect crime would be to hack hundreds of machines in a critical state's critical swing districts and then shade the numbers by the tiniest amount needed to do the job. See Ohio in 2004. That kind of electoral sharpshooting is beyond my expertise, but it's part of what makes Rove the power that he is.
Where did your machine come from? Who guarded it and how? Where did they get it from? Can it be opened with a hotel mini-bar key?
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Your post's enumeration of duties seems the best place to focus your efforts. Checking IDs and sign in sheets, preventing voter intimidation, and generally keeping a lid on procedure seems more important than being distracted by the possibility of a subtle electronic scam. Electronic fraud would most likely have been done to the machines before you get to see them and would be undetectable if done right. If done wrong, it will probably just look like a broken machine.
As numerous others have noted, I don't think it's a high probability that anyone will try tampering with a machine while it's out there on the polling station floor with your (and presumably others') eyes on it.
... though it may be there is no way for you to guarantee this.
You might want to find out what kind of process is in place to ensure the machines arrive at your facility in a "clean" state (i.e. they can be proved to accurately record and tabulate a series of test votes)
Second precaution: nobody, absolutely *nobody* gets unsupervised access to the machines while they are in storage prior to voting day. Somebody with a pop machine key and a USB stick can do in five minutes what ten thousand voters wouldn't be able to do on election day.
I'm a resident of Galveston right next door to you, and I'm really glad to hear that people in my area are thinking about this. Unfortunately, there probably aren't many things you can do during actual voting without appearing to be violating the voters privacy or interfering in the process, this is why the ability to conduct an audit in the event of fishy results is so critical.
The best I can suggest is to make your concerns heard among your peers and superiors, make sure that as many people as possible know that this is an issue we should *all* be concerned with. The more reasonable people who speak up the less we look like a fringe group of paranoid geeks. Other than that, find out as much as you can about the machines you are using. Do they have a paper audit trail? If not, who approved their purchase and why? Look them up by make and model, have they been broken before?
To slashdot users, enough with the trite smart-ass responses. Here is someone who is ostensibly trying to keep things fair, lets give him the benefit of the doubt (besides, our counties are so red he doesn't need to tamper to win) and try to come up with solutions. We have been complaining about voter machine vulnerabilities for years, now someone is finally listening. Do we jump down his throat, or do we welcome him to the table?
Spoken as a registered Democrat who desperately wants his vote to be counted.
Even worse is having too many machines being broken, or not enough machines to begin with, so voters have to wait hours in line, and many just end up leaving after deciding it's not worth it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
As a precinct chair, there is very little you can do, besides asking folks to report any suspicious behavior on the machine's part (displaying a selection other than what they selected, for example).
The real fraud, if it happens at all, happens quietly behind the scenes. The machine behaves exactly as it is supposed to but adds a number to the wrong tally. You can't check it later because there is no permanent record of what the voter saw on the screen before pressing "vote." The sole record is of that machine's final tally at the end of the day.
As others have said, the solution is: paper. Whatever they select on the screen, you ask the voter to print it out and read the paper. Then you stuff the paper in a locked box. You count the machine's tally (it's more cost-effective) but you now have a permanent record verified by the individual voters which you can audit in order to verify that the machine did as it claimed. Someone hacks the machine? No problem: just count the papers.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Fuck fairness to the Slashdot crowd - all the answers so far have been along the lines of
- Diebold is evil
- Bush is evil
- You can't do anything, so don't try
- the election is already rigged
I'm waiting for "You are a republican, so I'm not telling you. Nyaahhh nyaahhhh"
Only one has had a real suggestion - seals on physical access - and even that was surrounded by "but your fucked no matter what you do."
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The only way I personally will trust an electronic voting machine is if it prints out my vote on pain paper and asks for my approval before the vote is dropped in the box. This is obviously not how any of these machines are designed, so unfortunately we can trust none of them.
In the absence of the ideal, the only thing that somewhat ensures a proper vote tally is a paper trail. Every vote is printed directly on some physical medium when it is cast.
But even this is sadly not the case in many districts. Without the paper trail, you have NO guarantee that the election means anything at all. You can demand open source for the software on the machine; you can demand to see statistics before, during, and after the election; you can demand a box for yourself to see if you personally can figure out how to hack it; but all those acts are moot, if you don't have the paper trail to begin with.
-dave
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
I should point out the parties in power have such low approval ratings. Last I checked the Democrat controlled congress has a much lower approval rating (~18%) than president Bush does (~29%). http://www.gallup.com/poll/107242/Congress-Approval-Rating-Ties-Lowest-Gallup-Records.aspx
"Maintain thy airspeed, lest the ground rise up and smite thee." - Unknown
But you will NEVER be able to convince the bleeding hearts that there was not cheating, as long as a Republican wins. It's in their nature. It's OK for Daley to cheat in elections in Chicago, it's OK to vandalize buses set to get GOP voters out to the polls, etc...
Remember, it's not fascism when they do it.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Use profiling for starters. Look for white males between the ages of 18 and 60, then watch their behavior. I guess a real pro won't get nervous, but the amateurs will look nervous. If they get to vote behind a curtain, well, you're out of luck. Just check the seals before and after. Also, make sure the chain of custody is verified. Enlist the help of your Democratic counterpart.
Best regards.
We get so hung up on paper ballots as if this would be a cure all for voting fraud. In the Northeast, paper ballots were eliminated in favor of mechanical voting machines in order to eliminate fraud.
Yup, that's right. Back in the beginning of the last century, the biggest voting fraud was ballot box stuffing and ballot replacement. Read Carter's book "Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age" about his 1962 election for State Senate and see what type of fraud can occur with paper ballots.
When New York and New Jersey went with the mechanical voting machines, they instituted quite a few procedures to help eliminate fraud. The polling chief has a book containing all registered voters with their signatures. When a voter comes to vote, they sign that book, and the signatures are compared. Once the polling chief is satisfied that the person is a registered voter, they have the person sign a voting ticket in the ticket book. Once the ticket is signed, it is given to the person in charge of the voting booth. This person threads the ticket onto a string, and pulls a large lever to set the machine for voting. The voter enters the machine, pulls a lever to close the drapes, and this unlocks the voting switches. The voter can flip the switches for the people they want to vote for, and then pulls the lever to open the drapes. This registers the tallies and resets the voting switches.
The procedure is overseen by representatives of everyone on the ballot. A voter cannot vote twice because the machine needs to be reset by the person in charge of the voting booth. Diseased voters no longer show up to vote since you now have signatures to match against. The levers are set by the county and the machine is sealed and cannot be reset without a master key. The mechanical machines and the procedures that went with them helped clean up the elections in the Northeast.
The problem is that these mechanical systems (which could be programmed in a very limited way) have been replaced by general CPUs with some form of voting software that no one is 100% sure how it works. You could always see how the gears and levers turn, but you can't see electrons flowing through silicone. It isn't the lack of paper as much as the lack of assurance that no one replaced the software or the tallies on the memory card.
What we must understand is that a secure voting system is more than just a paper ballot which can be stuffed by the dozen into a ballot box. It is a whole procedure of verifying the voter, the ballot, and that there is a one-to-one correspondence of voters to ballots.
My suggestion is to take care of what you can. There is no way of knowing if the software on the machine hasn't been tampered with before it was brought into the polling station. But, verify that the memory card is sealed and cannot be tampered with. Verify that the counters are reset and are zeroed out before the voting starts. Put a system in place to make sure that voters can only vote once. Make sure that no one is hanging over the voter. Make sure the voters actually finished voting. Some will press the buttons for their candidates but forget to push the final "Vote" button. Make sure that the machine has been reset before each voter.
When the vote is finished, tally up the various totals and make sure they are in agreement. The number of votes should match the number of voters. Track the number of voters who simply decide not to vote and count them in any total.
More importantly, follow whatever procedures you have. Get a hold of them before election day and study them thoroughly. That's the biggest problem. The volunteers at the polls not knowing the voting procedure.
Lots of luck. I use to be a Texas poll watcher when we had those idiotic punch card ballots. We would verify that each card has cleanly punched chads before handing them to the voter. We had to verify that each voter had only a single punch card and we also would quickly examine the punched ballot for dimpled or hanging chads before
The easiest way is low-tech and fast. Just make the machine look like it was tampered with. They generally have a custody seal that has to be broken to get it open; often just a sticker. Someone can cut that sticker in 2 seconds with a pen knife. Now every vote from that machine is in question. If you are a member of party X and you know your voting precinct is mostly party Y, you could do a lot of damage in that 2 seconds.
Not much you'll be able to do about it.
I'm not an expert, but here's my take:
When you cast your vote, you are given a printed, human-readable copy of your ballot with a unique random index number printed on it, assigned at the moment your vote is cast, which is not linked to the voter rolls.
All the votes are available on a website as a spreadsheet, sorted by index number. Anyone can download the sheet for a given district, or for all precincts.
So, you download the sheet for your precinct, find your index number, and verify the recorded votes against your paper copy of the ballot.
You can also count the votes for each candidate, and see that your totals match the officially reported ones.
If they're not already, make the voter registration rolls open public records. That means that anyone can make spot checks, verifying that there are no dead people on the rolls. This list can be sorted by address, so you can check that there are not bogus addresses, or 100 people living in a two-room apartment.
The total number of voting records must be less than the total number of registered voters.
So, any individual voter can verify that:
1. His vote was recorded correctly.
2. The totals are being reported correctly.
3. Bogus votes haven't been inserted into the system.
Although that last check is weak, if enough people do spot checks, widespread, systematic fraud will likely be spotted, increasing the risk.
In the wrong hands, sanity is a dangerous weapon.
As a large supporter of full disclosure I would have to disagree. The only way to fix potential holes is to bring them to light. There will always be people attempting to find the next big hole in security, making it public how you can work around something may have a short term effect of feeding "script kiddies" but in the end it's undeniable that it is beneficial to security at large.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Haven't you guys got it all backwards? Why make an E-Voting machine that can be hacked/cracked or whatever when the real problem it was trying to solve was that voters (using paper) were incompetent. Wouldn't a more secure (and fail safe system) be a digital 'verifier' machine. That is, the voters use paper as normal and then place it in the 'verifier' to check that their vote is actually valid (and also display it on the screen for the voter to check). The vote then still goes into the traditional box.
There is essentially nothing you can do. There is a 'black box' (voting machine). Nobody except the guy that last tampered with it knows what it does. Voters push buttons on the box, and the box makes some entries in a database. There is no way to correlate the two.
If you ACTUALLY want to insure there is no (electronic) tampering. Disable the machines and have everyone cast paper ballots. Otherwise forget it. Personally I would resign since I wouldn't be capable of doing my job under the circumstances, and frankly maybe this charade would end if all the poll workers stood up and did that.
Thank you for asking though, it is really nice to know someone is concerned. Sorry we can't be more helpful, but the above is literally (and sadly) the truth...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
1) Make sure the company who built the machines is 100% reliable and they do 100% effective background checks on 100% of their employees and 100% of their patches and upgrades are secure and legitimate, and that no human there ever errs.
2) Make sure that all your machines are 100% physically secure 100% of the time up to and after elections so that the internals cannot be swapped or hacked, and that no human in charge of this errs
3) Watch 100% of voters 100% of the time to make sure none of them alters or hacks the machines, and make sure none of your staff ever err
See? It's easy! All it requires is blind faith that humans are infallible and will never do wrong intentionally or through error.
I'll stick to paper.
The chances of election tampering happening in your berg are pretty slim. People are just not sophisticated enough and the system is in too much flux to pull is off easily. As things settle and people gain experience the security holes will be bigger issues.
The bigger issues are two fold. Errors and the Appearance of fraud. These are indistinguishable on electronic voting machines.
So you job is to stay calm and go the extra mile to keep everything transparent. It does me no good if your deputy, the guy you've know since you were 8, donated his kidney to you, and married your kid sister seem trustworthy to you. You still have to do things the long boring way. Two people do operations, other witness. No ones word is taken for granted.
post results on the precint door if the law allows, BEFORE you transmit any results.
transparency is the key to trustworthy elections. Don't worry so much about fraud as making people see how the process works.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Vote anonymity is important, in EVERY election. It's not about being ashamed of your vote, but about not having ANY outside pressure influencing how you vote.
People should be allowed to vote even for something they 'should feel ashamed about', since that means they just disagree with the current morals of that community.