Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security

TechDirt notes the publication of the New Jersey voting machine study, the attempted suppression of which we have been discussing for a while now. The paper that the Princeton and Lehigh University researchers are releasing, as permitted by the Court, is "the same as the Court's redacted version, but with a few introductory paragraphs about the court case, Gusciora v. Corzine." What's new is the release of a 90-minute evidentiary video — the researchers have asked the court for permission to release a shorter version that hits the high points, as the high-res video is about 1 GB in size. See TechDirt's article for the report's executive summary listing eight ways the AVC Advantage 9.00 voting machine can be subverted.

Comments

"E-Voting Machine Security" like "Microsoft Works"

[corsec67]

An oxymoron.

The only thing a e-voting machine should be used for is printing a paper ballot.

Count the paper ballots.

Anything else means you have to trust the voting machine, or the people who verified the voting machine.
(You have to make sure that there are no hidden things in any of the chips, the software, any memory card that comes into contact with the machine, the network that the machine is connected to, etc. Seriously, who can possibly think that a E-voting machine with a Sprint data card in it is secure?)

if electronic voting

[circletimessquare]

could be made 100% secure, foolproof, etc., it should still not be used

simply because of the PERCEPTION of what happens to your vote in electronic voting

it is a black box. your votes go in, sausage comes out. meanwhile, a piece of paper has no secrets. it stays in a box, it can retallied. it can be messed with and falsified and burned, sure. but not with such ease and not in so many quick secret and immensely powerful ways electrons or magnetic marks on a disk can be messed with

all nations should use paper ballots, doesn't matter how rich they are. joe schmoe needs to touch and feel and smell his vote. voting machines and electronic voting represents a black box system, and therefore represents too much fundamental distrust. distrust undermines the legitimacy of democratically elected governments in the eyes of the people

it is not good enough that joe schmoe vote in absolute security and privacy and integrity. joe schmoe must also BELIEVE that. but in an irreducibly black box system, distrust is inescapable

electronic voting is the greates threat to democracy, ever. no ideological system or intolerant set of beliefs can undermine faith in democracy more than a method of tallying votes that the technofetishist loves, but the general populace views with suspicion

you don't need to say "gee whiz" when you vote

we need to end electronic voting, in the name of strengthening democracy

Re:if electronic voting

[corsec67]

I think you have the perception most people have of computers wrong.

Most people think computers are incapable of being incorrect. Microsoft is trying hard to change that, but they are getting less effective.

If the computer is wrong, it must have been something that the user did incorrect. "I shouldn't have clicked on that link to that page", instead of "The browser is broken, it shouldn't have been vulnerable to the stuff on that page"

I agree that paper ballots should be used, but most people think that if a computer is involved it will not be incorrect.

Re:if electronic voting

[FrameRotBlues]

For the majority of people, damn near everything in their lives is a "black box." Very few people understand how simple devices actually work. To most people:

• The automobile is a black box: put gas in, motion comes out.

• The computer is a black box: put electricity in, naked women come out.

• Television is a black box: put electricity in, naked women come out.

People have put their trust in black boxes for a long time. I'm neither for nor against electronic voting, but I do think there ought to be a paper trail and open source software running it, so it can be verified by a hastily-assembled group of people who don't want to be there.

Besides, any system is fallible: humans take part in it. Even if we kept with paper ballots, who's to say the officials in a district couldn't be paid off to swap the real ballot box with a fake one filled with a known number of ballots for Candidate X? And if the crime was admitted to, and the voters in that district were asked to vote again, would they all re-vote the exact same as they had before? Highly doubtful: they're human.

Hardware Work Around

[Gat0r30y]

Is very simple, and in fact I used it Today! - The Paper Ballot. I marked my choices, and turned it in. Voters in NJ should demand paper ballots, issue solved (sort of).

Re:Elections of 2010

[mr_josh]

The thing is, I don't think that everyone DOES know. I sincerely HOPE that they don't know, because no one is COMPLETELY OUTRAGED about it, and seriously, I think this should be a "people in the streets with torches and pitchforks" kind of issue. There simply seems to be zero public interest in this (and by "public" I of course mean the non-Slash-reading public) and it boggles the mind that some public figure hasn't jumped on this and made it a platform.

Simple paper ballots, overseen by observers

[bboxman]

Simple paper ballot. Allow observers from all interested (political) parties to monitor the voting station and the count.

Presto, solves verification of the internals of the not so obvious "voting machines". Voting machines aren't truly verificable.

Re:"E-Voting Machine Security" like "Microsoft Wor

[corsec67]

Because those are different cases.

The user isn't going to hack his own computer to get his credit card number. Hope that persons computer doesn't have a virus or key logger.

That insurance company or hospital hopefully will have physical security protecting their machines. That doesn't always work, surely you have seen the articles about x million peoples data lost from (company of the week).

Securing E-voting is really like DRM: you want to distribute a device to potential hackers, and keep it secure from those hackers.

If I didn't know any better

[WillAffleckUW]

You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd say that this was the same company as Diebold.

Oh, wait, it is ...

Re:"E-Voting Machine Security" like "Microsoft Wor

[corsec67]

Because the people with *physical* access aren't (usually) the people trying to hack the systems.

Re:"E-Voting Machine Security" like "Microsoft Wor

[vtcodger]

***E-voting done well is far superior to paper voting done well. The costs are far less, it's more convenient, and more environmentally friendly*** Sounds like utter and complete hogwash to me. E-voting is a complicated solution to an simple problem. The US uses all sorts of moderately complex and expensive mechanical voting aids that invariably lead to complaints of fraud, malfeasance, or failure to register votes (because they are busted). Canada uses paper ballots and counts them in a few hours. The paper ballot system is not broken. We should quit trying to fix it until we get a LOT smarter.

An obvious question...

[Dzimas]

Why doesn't the US revert to paper ballots? We just held a federal election in Canada, and things worked just fine with a good old fashioned pencil and a small paper ballot (well, actually more like thin card). It took us a matter of hours to successfully decide the fate of the country for the next X years without the need for millions of dollars worth of mysterious electronic machinery.

Re:"E-Voting Machine Security" like "Microsoft Wor

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Absolutely. Would you trust your credit card number to SSL if you knew there were hundreds, maybe thousands of professional hackers trying to sniff it?

You mean there aren't?

Paper ballots are ABSOLUTELY safe!

[mangu]

Count the paper ballots

Yeah, right! NO ONE can cheat in an election with paper ballots! The concept of a corrupt government did not exist before the invention of electronic voting.

*BULLSHIT*

Reading TFA: This is done by prying just one ROM chip from its socket and pushing a new one in, or by replacement of the Z80 processor chip. We have demonstrated that this ``hack'' takes just 7 minutes to perform.

Do you want to make a bet? Let's see how many paper ballots I can stuff in 7 minutes, given the same level of physical access one needs to change a chip in a computer. This means I can open a box, right? It doesn't matter if the box is electronic or not, it should have a padlock. If I can open the box, with no one noticing, it doesn't matter if the content is electronic or paper.

The intrinsic safety of electronic voting comes from the agility in counting. Counting a paper ballot box takes much longer than it takes to fill that box with a totally different set of votes. By the time you have counted, recounted, and counted again those paper votes, they could have been substituted a dozen times.
 

Re:Paper ballots are ABSOLUTELY safe!

[corsec67]

Lets change your bet a little bit. The 7 minutes are 2 days before the election. You get private time with the ballot box, I get private time with the voting machine.

What can you do to the ballot box that wouldn't be noticeable 2 days later and still affect the vote?

I was an election judge for Boulder County in 2004. Part of my duties as the head election judge for the precinct was to make sure that there was noting in the ballot box and seal it. From that time until I handed the box to the county officials, it was not left in the presence of any single person, so nobody would have 7 minutes during the election day.

You can't stuff the ballot box 2 days before the election with nobody being able to notice.

**THAT** is what they are complaining about. The machines were left in publicly accessible areas for days before the election. Replace one of the chips with that 7 minutes, and it would take a very detailed examination to notice the problem.

Re:Paper ballots are ABSOLUTELY safe!

[mangu]

I was an election judge for Boulder County in 2004

And I was an election judge for Itatiaia, in Brazil, in 1998. I had more or less the same duties as you had. It was an electronic box.

I inserted a flash card with the software, including the operating system, which was given to me by an officer of the electoral court minutes before the election started.

If you can corrupt a representative of the judge who is responsible for declaring if the vote is correct, does it matter if the box is electronic or paper?

From that time until I handed the box to the county officials

You are ready to swear for the honesty of those county officials, yet you don't trust the people who handled the electronic box before the election?

The machines were left in publicly accessible areas for days before the election.

That's *WRONG*, no matter if the ballots were paper or electronic. No part of an electoral process should be left unattended at any time at all.

To sum up, you have absolute trust in the paper voting system, because you have absolute trust in the way the paper ballot was handled *AFTER* the election, but you mistrust the electronic vote because you mistrust the way the electronic box is handled *BEFORE* the election.

For me, both systems can be corrupted, but the electronic system is better because, given the same level of precaution before and after the election, the electronic system gives faster results. To cheat, you need physical access to the system, so the quickest system is safer.

Re:LOL

[db32]

I can't bring myself to make a scented Palin joke.

Every time I get upset about the tremendous disaster that our modern voting is with the rampant election fraud I remind myself... I am getting upset over the fairness of a system that will only let me choose between two criminals for who should be the leader. It seems to me that getting up in arms about the whole voting trainwreck is pretty stupid considering what we are demanding our votes get counted for. When I am faced with a choice more complex than liar/asshole vs asshole/liar I will be more concerned about how my vote gets counted. As it stands now I can rest assured that no matter what I do my vote would go towards putting a liar and an asshole in office.

I mean really now...its like being lost in the woods and choosing if you want to wipe the shit off your ass with your left hand or your right hand. Which hand you choose is pretty tangent to the fact that you are lost in the damned woods. Seems to me we should be a little more concerned about getting out of the woods than to be upset about which hand got shit on it.

Re:Don't look

[cayenne8]

"Registration is not voting. Nice try, fail."

False registration is the first step in voter fraud, is it not?

And flamebait on the original post? What...Is rigging the machines not just as bad as encouraging and aiding voter fraud by fraudulently registering voters multiple times, fake voters, etc?

I mean...c'mon...if it is bad for one side, it is bad for the other side too.

Re:Don't look

[KovaaK]

encouraging and aiding voter fraud by fraudulently registering voters multiple times, fake voters, etc?

And if you actually look into it beyond fox news and the "sources" that they quote, you may find out that it is legally required by a voter registration group such as ACORN to submit every single registration form that they receive, regardless of if they think it is valid. They are allowed to mark ones that they believe to be invalid, so that they will be further inspected by actual officials, but to my knowledge, no one has questioned the accuracy of their markings. The issues with false registrations are mostly being found as cases of the person collecting registrations attempting to hit quotas to prove that he/she is actually working. Molehill, not a mountain.

False registration is the first step in voter fraud, is it not?

It could be the first step, but it isn't necessary for voter fraud (as some other replies around this thread suggest, there are plenty of ways to mess with democracy).

As for this particular method, are you suggesting that people going to show up with fake ID's to match the false registrations that they submitted? Seems a bit more involved than designing the machines to falsely provide results.

Outside of that, I have recently realized an issue of concern regarding our electoral process... some people have realized that many minorities who are legal citizens of the country and should be allowed to vote aren't being allowed to vote because they lack ID that is accepted at the time of voting. The problem is that while the Democrats are fighting to get these ID laws removed, they aren't really acknowledging that false registrations in conjunction with no ID required would completely undermine our voting system. We still need to find a way for all citizens to vote though (preferably not a solution involving ID's with RFID chips, GPS tracking or whatever else is remotely possible).