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."

Comments

Do you have a paper trail?

[bit trollent]

Does your E-Vote equipment produce a voter verifieable paper trail?

If it doesn't have a paper trail, ask yourself why.

Re:Do you have a paper trail?

[FredFredrickson]

Yeah, without a paper trail, the question you should be asking is - how can you spot E-Vote integrity? The answer is: You can't.

Re:Do you have a paper trail?

[SatanicPuppy]

Ideally the machine should spit out a paper confirming your choices, and you should drop that in a box on the way out the door, after you verify it. Generating a piece of paper that the voter never sees is pointless.

Now, you're probably thinking, "That sounds like a paper ballot system? Why would we pay all this money for these fancy machines when we have to basically fall back on a paper ballot system to make sure they're reliable?"

And that is the real question.

Re:Do you have a paper trail?

[DavidTC]

Oh, no, it's not 'poor areas'.

It's poor urban areas. I have lived in middle-class urban areas, lower-class urban areas, and lower-class rural areas.

In the first, the lines are maybe 30 minutes, because they have plenty of machines and whatnot.

In the middle, thanks to laws that say you have to have a voting precinct within walking distance (theoretically, it's about five miles I think), each precinct has only two machines, but it's only serving a few hundred people total, so there's no one in line at all.

It's the latter that has five machines and possibly a hundred people in line. I waited a damn four hours to vote in 2000 in Marietta, a poor, mostly minority suburb of Atlanta. During that time, at least 20 people ahead of me dropped out of line, and I imagine more left the second they saw how long it was. (I, luckily, was a college student, and could waste all day in line with a book.)

And I went through during the midday. I can just imagine how it went after five o'clock.

And no one's going to convince me that it's a coincidence that 'poor urban voter' normally means 'Democratic voter'.

Don't even try to sell it on that grounds, because there are people all over this country whose franchise would be a lot easier to exercise if they could just use a pencil and a piece of paper.

Exactly, you pro-'electronic voting' morons. If you want to install electronic voting machines for blind people, feel free, but you can fuck off and die for taking away pencil and paper so people in poor urban areas can actually vote.

Electronic voting, as stated, is a solution to the very minor problem of disenfranchised blind people. One that could be solved other ways, or just by giving them a single machine. Note, this machine could be a great deal simpler than existing electronic voting machines, because blind people do not need a screen or a touch pad. They can't even use those! They need a headset and a several switches. Or, hell, a joystick-like device to scroll through the names said through the headphone and pick the right one.(1)

But installing machines for everyone causes at least two serious problems...the one in this post, because machines are always limited, and the other, equally serious one of uncatchable vote tampering, which any computer scientist can see, as computers can easily lie. (Yes, in theory, this problem applies if anyone is using the machines, but in practice the number of blind voters is so small that any tampering would be easily noticed.)

1) You know what might be really interesting? Using telephones. Not the actual phone system, but using one (with a headset so they don't have to keep holding it) as the interface device. They're cheap, and blind people, like every American except possibly deaf ones (Who luckily can use paper ballots), already know how to operate them. Have a little voice mail-type system.

That's the hard part

[CastrTroy]

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.

How To Spot E-Vote Tampering?

[yo303]

If the machine says Diebold on it, there's a good chance it has been tampered with.

First step is easy:

[Em Adespoton]

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.

Malfunction bigger threat than Hacking. Seal it!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not you

[WindBourne]

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.

Just ask the votes

[pieterh]

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.

Pay Attention to Low Tech Fraud

[Sponge Bath]

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.

Re:Malfunction bigger threat than Hacking. Seal it

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Someone please...

[hcmtnbiker]

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.

Things to do

[goombah99]

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.