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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."
So what you're really asking is what sort of evidence of tampering you should be sure to avoid leaving behind?
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.
Look for the flashing lights and sudden appearances of 3d interfaces - because everyone knows that hacking is just like it appears in the movies
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.
Bush wins.
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
The most egregious fraud on electronic voting machines is completely out of your control, and most likely happens out of sight of any precinct level election official: in the software that is installed on the machines. Unless you have the authority and knowledge to inspect many thousands of lines of code on each machine, you are powerless in this regard.
However, most machines have some type of USB, SD card, or other hardware interface that might be protected with some type of tamper proofing, like the foil seals on aspirin bottles. This is probably beyond your authority to put in place, though.
The only thing you can do is pay attention to the tabulations, if you get to see them.
I recommend you watch Hacking Democracy for insight on what to watch for.
(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
In all fairness to the /. crowd, I'd say that the best place to ask this question would be the forums of http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
From what I have read of their analysis of previous elections I would guess that they have seen it all before.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
I think it's important to realize that voting machines are so insecure that preventing fraud entirely is impossible. That said,
1) Ensure that the machines are physically safe before the election. Don't leave them in an insecure area between the time that you check them to ensure that the counts are at zero (and DO check that) and the time that voting begins. Allow nobody near the machines without both ID and a witness at all times, including yourself (you don't want to be accused of anything), ESPECIALLY if they claim to work for the company that makes the machines. In fact, if anyone you don't know shows up to work on the machines, get approval from as far up the chain of command as can be managed and WRITE DOWN the name, time, etc. if it happens. Consider some sort of tamper-evident seal for the area where the machines are stored (your local trucking company can provide you with a handful of the ones that they use on freight trailers).
2) Watch for voters who are holding either memory cards or keys. The best-publicized ways of messing with a machine involve unlocking the machine and/or inserting a card with altered data. Keep in mind that the memory cards can be a lot smaller than those giant plastic cases around some of the official cards. Also keep in mind that if you see this, it might just be somebody with a spare memory card for their camera and a set of car keys.
3) After the polls close, physical access becomes a big deal again. Don't allow anyone near the machines or cards without ID and a witness, including yourself. Ensure that the machines are locked away, and find out who has a copy of the key to the room/closet/truck/whatever.
--
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.
This is admittedly a little off-topic as it doesn't answer the original poster's questions, but I'd like to see a national system where, when I vote I'm issued a random number. When I get home I can look up my number on the net and it will show how I voted. That way I at least know how my own vote was 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.
I'm assuming that you have the Hart InterCivic system as stated by The Verifier. In that event, as other authiors have noted you may have no hope of detecting truly electrionic tampering. However you may spot some things. The links below also apply to Diebold and ES&S systems as well.
I would be sure, to tell all voters to read the confirmation screen carefully. Many other locations have reported instances of vote switching where voters, once they reach the closing screen, see a different outcome than they pushed. Evidence from a Rice University study indicates that less than 30% of people even read this screen but those that do have reported nontrivial numbers of flipped votes.
Secondly I would educate yourself about the machines. Ohio's Everest study, particularly chapter 14 contains many scary things about the machines. Some you can look for, many you cannot.
You will also find information from the California study notably the red-team reviews of the hart system.
Voters Unite is also a source of some good info As does Pollworkers.us which is a useful site for those working the polls.
troll, funny, does not matter.
:)
I live in Harris Co. and the machines are pretty horrendous. They look pretty, but there is no form of verification whatsoever. As for the asshats who say that we have secure electronic systems for securities trading, credit card systems and bank ATMs... well just remember that not one of those systems is anonymous.
As to detecting "fradulent activity" as an election judge, well if you hear somone operating a power screwdriver or see small parts being dropped on the floor, well that is about as good as you can get on detecting tampering with those damnable machines. In other words, you are not going to detect any fraud that involves hacking the machines. You are limited to what you can do to prevent "old fashioned" fraud - ie the vote early and often crowd. Since there are no ballot boxes you don't have to worry about them being tampered with
Now if you could demand photo ID (and anyone presenting those cards from the Mexican consulate should be immediately deported) and compare that against your local voter rolls that would be nice. It would also be nice if you had some way to update your voter rolls by checking against death certificates issued in the last year.
Using a machine as an interface would be fine, just let it print a darn ballot that the voter can verify.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
I work as a elections inspector in California, which means that I'm in charge of a single precinct -- I'm basically the head pollworker, responsible for the accountability of the ballots and equipment from the time it's delivered to me until the time I turn it in immediately after the election. Because of that, it's important that I am fully aware of what's going on with our equipment and alert to the possibility of tampering. My best defense has been knowledge -- which is a double-edged sword. I know how our system works. I understand the reasoning for each step of our process. I've taken every possible class offered by our county and achieved the highest possible level of certified proficiency with the equipment. So, instead of wondering what could go wrong, I understand the risk areas. For example, our equipment now has unique coded seals for every unused input/output port, and I know to watch to ensure those stay intact.
Ask "Why?" Ask to have equipment and processes explained to you. But at the same time, make sure that every moment of the day, you're acting beyond reproach. I hold my poll workers to very high standards, because every moment of every day, we're possibly under scrutiny, and it's important that there never be even the slightest incorrect impression that we're not being fully compliant to the rules and laws involved. I've actually had poll workers get angry and leave early because I was asking them to comply with the rules and they were unhappy being told, "No, you can't talk to your friend who is voting about politics" or "No, you can't imply you don't like a candidate by giving someone a funny look when they ask about a ballot option," or "No, you can't use your laptop/PDA/cellphone in our polling place".
But I'm pretty freakin' idealistic about what I do. If I lived where I grew up, I'd be a poll worker in a place where these have been real problems for decades. Right now, I live and work as a poll worker in a part of the country that has not historically had problems with voter disenfranchisement. So my work may have less meaning, in some ways, but it's still important. (Sorry, I feel very strongly about what I do, and it's hard not to talk about that.)
You would do yourself and the voters a big favor by considering BOTH. They are different things.
Voter Fraud is where a voter misrepresents some element of their vote cast. Maybe it's casting more than one vote, a vote in the wrong place, a vote without entitlement to vote, etc...
The GOP seems focused on the latter, BTW. It's a touchy subject for sure. IMHO, you are doing the right thing, and will have the high ground if you are focused on getting as many voters to vote as possible, not keeping as many voters from voting as possible.
The key here is that Voter Fraud is some act on the part of the voter.
Election Fraud is where the result of the election is being manupulated. That difference between preventing as many voters as possible, and promoting as many voters as possible, is one that can be election fraud, as well as being voter fraud. One example that serves to demonstrate election fraud would be to publish information that would disqualify voters that would not otherwise be disqualified. If this is done in a discriminatory fashion, there is a solid case for it potentially being voter fraud. Could be ignorance too, and that's gonna be one for the courts for sure!
Another case of election fraud would be mis-programmed voting machines, or deliberate under / over allocation of them to impact the numbers of votes and the accuracy of the votes. (and I'm getting to the topic of accuracy in a moment) We saw some of this in Ohio big time in 2004, BTW.
Still another would be manipulating the record of the vote. This could be done to impact or prevent a recount, for example. That's totally election fraud, not voter fraud. Maybe every voter did the right thing, but the election is still hosed. That's one way to tell the difference right there.
Now, can you trust the damn things?
No. Absolutely not. I don't care if they have a paper printer fitted or not, and here is why:
When you make a mark on media, as the voter, the chain of trust between your intent and the record of the vote is complete! You know what who you want to vote for, and you can directly see the record of the vote cast. This record does not require any enabling technology to be observed and verified as being true to the intent and therefore the "right" vote cast.
When you vote with electrons, this chain of trust is broken! Really, the voter knows who they want to vote for and does something to tell the machine their intent. So far, so good. Now, here's the kicker and why we should NEVER, EVER use the machines.
What gets recorded is what the machine thinks the voter intent is! Think this part through. Let's say we walk up to the machine and cast a vote for Bob. We push the Bob button, get visual feed back, and a printed piece of paper that shows that the vote was for Bob. Feeling good right?
What if the electronic record of the vote is for Jane? How can we know? We can't actually see the electrons now can we? The machine can easily show us a Bob vote and contain a Jane vote in the record used for the tally and there is absolutely no way we can verify that didn't happen, short of direct observation and a real time tally, keyed to each vote. (and that's just stupid)
Here's another very simple way to look at it. Say I am the voting machine and I'm keeping a mental record of votes cast so that I can contribute them to the final tally. You vote Bob, and I count one for Bob. Then, I change that to Jane, after you have verified it. What evidence is there for that vote having ever been Bob? There is none. Electrons can just change, where paper will show some evidence of having been changed. The physical media is rendered less than perfect in the process of counting votes. Electronic storage devices don't exhibit this same quality on a directly observable human scale.
Put simply, it's a vote by proxy and therefore cannot be trusted.
Some will say the paper can check the electronic results. I would agree, but invoking the check i
Blogging because I can...
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
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.
First your question holds the telescope at the wrong end. Tampering by voters is much less likely to occur because it is unlikely to change an election out come or occur in an undetectable manner. The people to watch are the election officials, with pre-a nd post voting access to the machines.
That said what a voter can do depends on what machines you have in use. Lets consider the big three Diebold, Seqouia edge or ES&S ivotronic and no voter verified paper trails.
On the ES&S, the voter is usually facing the machine in a privacy carrel and the machine is a flat block. It very possible for a voter to complete obscure the following transaction ( I know because I've done it). Flip the 5 pound machine over and you find little plastic door. you can easily force this open. Behind it is the Flash memory cards. Yank these out and put them in your pocket. close the food and flip the machine over. Leave and the election is screwed.
It's also possible a diabolically well outfitted voter could have a second PBS device in his pocket. Armed with that, he can can admin access to the machine and do anything they like and vote as many times as they wish.
With Sequoias edges, depending on the model revision number there can be a little yellow button on the back. Pressing that causes the machine to go in to supervisor mode. If I lean forward I can just reach around and get that button. If you were watching you could see me execute this clumsy maneauver.
I've never had the chance to play with diebolds so I can't offer specifics Some diebolds have an unguarded IR port that a hacker might be able to do something interesting with on their palm pilot. But I don't think there's any known attacks yet.
On all of these machines, it's possible to miscalibrate the screens. The screens can be miscalibrated by heat or scratching them with keys. In the neighboring county we had one guy running for office actually carve his name into the machine. Unfucking believable.
That same county had a vote buying operation going on (a few people got arrested and convicted). So make sure people vote alone.
For systems with paper tapes (not paper ballots) you can sell your vote if you have a camera or cell-phone camera because a picture of the voted paper tape before it scrolls out of sight is proof of vote. So no cameras!
But the problem with all these is that there's a huge risk to the bad voter and they can only affect a few votes. At worst they wreck one machine and probably get caught. Vote flipping is hard if not impossible at the retail level.
THe really fun things happen when supervisors can reprogram systems, get access to the flash media and have the ability to replace it.
Perhaps the best way to sabotage an election is the Denial of Service attack. Simply having machines not boot in the morning tends to filter out working wage-class folks over seniors or people on salaries. Having long lines in the late afternoon filters out working moms that have to go pick up the kids and take them to soccer practice. Likewise breakdowns in the evening are cool because you can close the polls while there are still people who have not voted. (see Ohio for example).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.