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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.
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 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
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.
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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.
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
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...
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.
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.