Can Static Electricity Generate Votes?

artgeeq writes "A recent local election in Washington, DC resulted in 1500 extra votes for a candidate. The board of elections is now claiming that static electricity caused the malfunction. Is this even remotely possible? If so, couldn't an election be invalidated pretty easily?"

Comments

Valid election?

[stm2]

I can't understand how do you people accept voting with back boxes (that is, w/o access to source code).

Re:Valid election?

[j0nb0y]

I personally have no problem with black box voting machines, provided that they print out a human readable ballot, and the printed ballot is the only official ballot for the purpose of vote counting.

Open source was always a distraction from the real issue. I like open source, but we shouldn't use this issue to try to push open source. It just doesn't make sense. Open source doesn't guarantee security. If the computer is responsible for maintaining the vote total, there will be the possibility of mischief, whether the software is open source or not.

Re:Valid election?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I agree that open source is a distraction from the real issue(though it is, I would argue, a likely part of the solution to the real issue, so it comes up for a reason); but I think that the real issue is slightly different. For the purpose of discussion, I propose a measure, call it the "Nixon Number". A system's Nixon Number is the smallest plausible number of people who would have to conspire in order to subvert that system successfully. The real problem with electronic voting is not closed vs. open per se, it is the fact that, thus far, we keep building systems with pitifully low Nixon Numbers in order to do the job, when what we need is the exact opposite. A system's Nixon Number depends on hardware, software, procedures, and institutional safeguards.

Open Source licencing is not necessary to build a system with high Nixon Number, nor is it assured that an OSS system will have one. However, I would argue that(barring substantial advances in static analysis of binaries, or the like) publicly auditable code, along with a publicly available trusted compiler, publicly disclosed hashes of all binaries, etc, etc. is in practice necessary to achieve a Nixon Number high enough to be considered for critical uses like voting. The code doesn't have to be under a licence allowing free reuse, or reuse at all; but it must be available for inspection by anybody, for any reason, without limitation or expense.

That alone is by no means good enough, the other main issue is hardware security. Unfortunately, techniques for assuring that hardware is doing what it ought to be are as yet immature(see this from EETimes). In practice, voting and similar critical systems should probably be conducted on minimal complexity systems, so that the necessary chips can be manufactured with oversight, in secure fabs, and optically or otherwise verified.

Even, that, though, isn't enough. Beyond hardware and software security and transparency, a high Nixon Number requires that the technology be surrounded by a robust institutional structure. We have, thus far, failed here as well. The election commissions have, on the whole, done an awful job of enforcing oversight of voting system vendors, and have rubber stamped known broken systems.



Ultimately, I think the difficulties of electronic voting have two parts. The first is that it isn't an easy problem. The second is that we don't take it nearly seriously enough. If elections are not free and fair, democracy has fallen. Period. Full Stop. No ifs, ands, or buts. E voting is not something to be done on the cheap. It is not something we can trust vendors to do. We are treating E voting like a minor IT procurement project, when we should be treating it as Democracy's Manhattan Project.

Re:Valid election?

[Smallpond]

You do realize that a result with only a 0.001 chance of happening still does happen 1 time in a thousand, don't you? How are you going to base anything on a random sampling? You can't prove an outcome is biased, only that the likelihood has a certain probability of occurrence.

Solution?

[iminplaya]

Paper ballots?

Re:Solution?

[compro01]

I find it difficult to believe that people cannot design and implement a reliable, electrically actuated hole punching machine usable by everyone eligible to vote in the bloody country.

Repeat it?

[sqrt(2)]

Generating static electricity isn't very difficult. I can't imagine it would be very hard to repeat this problem and prove that static was causing it. But the whole idea of the scientific method has really fallen out of favor in this country, why not just make up an explanation that feels true instead of investigating. I'm sure no one was trying to sway the elections...

Electronic voting is such a horrible, horrible idea.

Re:Repeat it?

[rtconner]

I think the point is that this is not physically even possible, and it's obvious that lies are being told. A data storage device that is not protected from static electricity is not a storage device at all.

Re:Repeat it?

[Spy der Mann]

Here in Mexico we have a quite different electoral system:

To vote, voters are given IDs with photograph to make sure they don't cheat and vote twice.

The ones counting the votes are citizens (chosen randomly, just like members of a jury), supervised by a representative of each one of the political parties, who can complain later about any bad behavior they saw.

Later, the urns with all the ballots are sent to the main office of the electoral institute, also independent from the government (but funded by it), who then take the count results - if there is a complaint, the complaint is followed and the ballots are recounted. If they can't for some reason (such as the evidence of ballots being stolen - they're numbered), the urn is declared null and its votes are not counted for the final result.

After all the complaints are addressed, the partial count results are summed by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and the winner is declared.

This procedure is expensive, slow and exhausting, but at least it's guaranteed to give honest results.

Excuse me?

[iminplaya]

Also, voters wearing paraphernalia, caps, t-shirts and stickers, for candidates to the voting precinct, the board of elections said if poll workers see it, they will throw people out.

I guess these places are not free speech zones.

Bullshit.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I don't buy it. Static can definitely frag electronic devices that aren't properly protected; but having static damage and/or random bit flipping cause 1500 extra votes to appear in an otherwise valid filesystem is the computer equivalent of a human getting cancer and, instead of a lethal tumor, growing an extra, fully functional eye.

At best, the system is seriously, seriously flawed. If there is even basic checksumming in place(never mind signing) it would be functionally impossible for static damage to imitate valid data. At bad, there is some other error entirely, and it has been decided that an idiot emitting bullshit is cheaper and easier than actually investigating the problem. At worst, which is upsettingly plausible, the system is suffering from outright fraud, and those involved don't even feel the need to lie convincingly.

Re:Bullshit.

[GrpA]

Actually, depending on just how badly designed the system is (think primary-school-level understanding of technology that most managers have) it could be plausible... Especially without any details on how the system works.

Static (when it doesn't destroy an input by shorting out the diode protection network on it) causes a signal to be received.

If you designed a basic enough cartridge (eg, 1 button on each input, with the cartridge just registering "Button Presses") then yes, I can actually imagine that causing false votes registered.

And I can also imagine vote machines using this type of technology as non-tech savvy people design this equipment and I've seen designs as stupid as this in money changing machines...

And it didn't take the kids at arcades long to figure out rub your feet on the carpet, get free coins.

If they can make this mistake on a machine giving out their own money, then beleive me, it's not that much of a stretch of imagination to beleive they would do something equally stupid in the design of a voting machine.

GrpA

slot machines are protected from static shocks and

[Joe The Dragon]

slot machines are protected from Static shocks and other hacks and this seems like a hack job and not a static shock.

Why can't they make voting systems that are just as hard to hack?

I think that the NGC should look at the voting system to see how bad they are.