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Sequoia Voting Systems Source Code Released
Mokurai sends a heads-up about Sequoia Voting Systems, which seems to have inadvertently released the SQL code for its voting databases. The existence of such code appears to violate Federal voting law: "Sequoia blew it on a public records response. ... They appear... to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold. They were wrong. The Linux 'strings' command was able to peel it apart. Nedit was able to digest 800-MB text files. What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code." The code is all available for study or download, "the first time the innards of a US voting system can be downloaded and discussed publicly with no NDAs or court-ordered secrecy," notes Jim March of the Election Defense Alliance. Dig in and analyze.
To be honest shouldn't -any- code used to tally votes be released in the public domain for any US citizen?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
grep and find who should have won the election?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I really can't see why we can't have a government-commissioned open-source system developed and mandated for use for public voting functions.
I absolutely hate the thought of my vote being inputted in to a closed magical-mystery box.
To make light of this does not do justice. This is potentially huge news.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election
What exactly does that mean?
Means they suspect that the code for the actually tallying and evaluating ballots is in SQL. It is suggested that this violates the law for being dynamic and interpreted.
I for one welcome our Afghan overlords!
"code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election"
Which means the uneducated inspecting strings saw things like:
BAL_ID null
-- 1 - show candidate on ballot (default)
-- 0 - remove candidate from the ballot
-- 2 - don't show candidate on the ballot, but reserve space for her on the layout
All of which is perfectly benign when voters are not eligible to vote for certain candidates for any number of reasons.
The more you read at the ultimate site more you realize the people digging thru this garbage know nothing about what they are reading, and not much about programming either.
Just because you know how to run grep or strings does not mean you can use the data it reveals.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Anyone with half a brain realized converting from dumb paper ballots to "smart" electronic machines that could manipulate the votes was a Bad Idea (tm). Unfortunately that disqualifies most of our state politicians.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
votes[candidate]++;
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As my Software Engineering instructor said...
Someone was thinking that voting was primarily a counting problem and had the idea that computers were excellent at counting, so computers would be excellent at registering votes.
Of course, voting is minimally about counting, and from what we've seen even these clowns couldn't do that right.
How about this?
You select your candidate / party / referendum option on screen.
The computer prints out a ballot paper and records your vote.
You put the ballot paper in the ballot box.
The returning officer selects a sample of ballot boxes at random and checks them to the computer.
Now does stripping the illusion of voting away make us more or less free
Don't blame me! I voted for Kodos!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
They may have violated the regulations, but it is still not clear that anything they did would have had any real impact. Best to wait and see what the analysis reveals.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've never seen the necessity to complicate things any further than paper, pencil, double physical count. Cheap, no machines involved, fast. On a national election down here (about 15 million voters), voting booths close at 6pm and results are known nation wide right on time to open the 8pm evening news.
* t violates the federal rulebook on voting systems on several levels: the rules require that code be hash-checked to prove authenticity in the field for obvious reasons. If the real working code is buried in with the data, no such hash-checks are possible.
Except that so far, I'm seeing table construction and table layouts. I guess that's technically code - as any SQL technically is - but a good case can be made to say that it's just the database structure. Which can, of course, be subjected to a hash check.
The federal rulebook is also clear that code can't be interpreted, apparently to avoid modification "in the field" (generally county or city election offices).
Well shit, in that case, they can't use SQL at all. Since a database is a fairly reasonable way to track the candidate data, display strings, etc... I'm pretty sure that this wasn't the intent of the law. (No, IANAL, just applying common sense).
I do think it's great and long overdue that this information is now available. But I also think they'll want to finish the analysis and get some people who understand what they're looking at, before they start making claims. There may be validity to them - but so far it's tenuous if there at all. (Full disclosure: I'd love to electronic voting either a) shut down or preferably b) administered in a 100% transparent fashion... so I'm not making this post in anybody's defense)
The file they have is simply a SQL Server backup.
It takes a few minutes to restore using SQL 2005 Express + SSMSE
Nothing has been destroyed or sabotaged.
but...
When the database is restored you get the tables with the data in. :)
All the stored procedures have been deleted. Or so Seqoia thought
As the use of strings on the backup file demonstrates, the text of the sp's are still there.
There are various database tools (Lumigent was one from memory) that allow looking back through the database log and, I expect, returning the database to a previous state.
Just when companies had got the hang of cleaning up after track changes they move on to SQL database backups :)
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've never seen the necessity to complicate things any further than paper, pencil, double physical count. Cheap, no machines involved, fast. On a national election down here (about 15 million voters), voting booths close at 6pm and results are known nation wide right on time to open the 8pm evening news.
Except that Americans like to vote on everything.
Not just politicians, but sherifs, judges, district attorneys (i.e., head government prosecutors), etc. Add this to the fact that most elections (municipal, county, state, federal) tend to happen on one day, so that when you walk into the booth, you don't just have a piece of paper, but a small booklet to go through. Then add propositions (i.e., referendums) that many states have if enough people sign a petition. If you want to be an educated voter on all the possible choices you have to do some serious studying.
And then you have to count all of these 20+ separate run offs for the various levels of government.
I shouldn't be able to verify my own vote. If I can verify my vote, I can prove to myself after the fact how I voted, and therefore I can prove it to somebody else. That somebody else might try to coherce me into voting a specific way. I much prefer paper, pen, and hand counted. That way, I can verify the box is empty before everyone puts their vote in. Verify that my vote went into the box, and verify that the box was opened and that all votes in the box were counted correctly. I wouldn't be able to identify my ballot apart from the other ballots in the box, but that would be good, because nobody would be able to coherce me to vote a particular way. Just knowing that my vote was an a box, and that the box was counted correctly is enough for me to know that my vote was counted correctly.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You are required to give your hash code to your boss. HE looks up your vote and picks A or B. 50-50 chance he picks the fake one and you live. 50-50 chance he picks the real one and you lose your job.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
How to restore the .bak file using Microsoft SQL Server Express 2008:
Step 1. Go download SQL Server Express 2008 (This is trivial, left up to the reader. You might have to go to a microsoft webpage) and install.
Step 2. Go download SQL Tools for SQL Server (Trivial) and install.
Step 3. Go download the .bak.zip file from the above wiki. Save it to 'C:\foofoo\'. Unzip the .bak file within it to 'C:\foofoo\'. You should now have: 'C:\foofoo\RIV_20081104_Canvass_Final_dbset_E.bak'
Step 4. Start up SQL Server Express
Step 5. Open SQL Management Studio and connect to your local SQLEXPRESS instance.
Step 6. Click on the top most node in (Should be your machine's name\SQLEXPRESS). Click "New Query".
Step 7. Run the following query:
RESTORE DATABASE RIV_20081104_E FROM disk='C:\foofoo\RIV_20081104_Canvass_Final_dbset_E.bak'
WITH MOVE 'RIV_20081104_Esys' TO 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\RIV_20081104_Esys.mdf',
MOVE 'RIV_20081104_Edat' TO 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\RIV_20081104_Edat.mdf',
MOVE 'RIV_20081104_Elog' TO 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\RIV_20081104_Elog.ldf',
REPLACE
go
Step 8. Wait.
Step 9. This should create a database called RIV_20081104_E.
Have fun.
Doesn't work like that, at least where I live. In my place, you can come in to check if the see-through box is empty and sealed before the voting begin. Then you have parties representatives that take turn to check the whole process during the day (and keep an eye on each others as well as looking after election judges), and finally, the public is much welcomed to come back (or even stay the whole day, if you prefer so) and help count the ballots at the end of the day. The result is then phoned at the town house, where all results for the town are tallied on a paperboard in front of the public. Through some administrative layers, it climbs up through counties and districts up to the national level. Nothing is ever done behind closed doors ; anybody has a right to attend every step physically, in person. In the end, it's a giant peer-reviewed open-source process that's happening under the very eyes of everybody. In the morning, through local newspapers, you can break down the full result down to every single voting place in the whole country.
I don't think the American public would really be all that upset if the election results didn't come in until the next morning. I suspect it's actually the news media that wants the results ASAP, in order to get everyone watching the election day evening news so that they can charge more for ad space.
Good catch, that's the sort of thinking I was hoping to hear from.
OK then one more tweak. The receipt you print in the booth can either be your real or your dummy vote. You pick just before you leave. So if you are being coerced, you can pick the dummy receipt but if you want to watch over your vote you pick the real receipt to take home.
So in this case you don't get an A/B choice when you get home and punch in the URL. It immediately shows a vote, either the dummy or the real, whichever you elected to get the receipt for.
Are we bulletproof yet? That doesn't look like it adds any real complexity to what I'm trying to keep to a bare minimum.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This might hurt your feelings but: you're a Canadian. Most Americans don't consider you ever.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The reason voting irregularities mean diddly squat in a presidential election is due to the fact that Joe Citizen's votes don't matter directly.
Thanks to the electoral college, any voting irregularities are overruled by the imprimatur elector fiat.
As a matter of due diligence, I will look up your "David Chaum's blind signature" (I may have already). I'm certain it will have a fatal flaw, as has every system I've examined thus far. It doesn't matter how many people jump up and down in support of their ideologies or how vigorously. Nobody has shown me a secret ballot, end-to-end verifiable voting system. I do not believe one exists. (I would like to be proven wrong, but I don't think anybody can.)
Disclaimer: I am a cryptographer, and I have done research on topics related to electronic voting in the past.
As a matter of simply stating a fact, regardless of your due diligence, the fact is that blind signatures and their application to electronic voting is a subject which is about 15 years old by now. If you didn't already know about this concept, then you are clearly not an expert in electronic voting or even in any related field of cryptology. Cryptographic electronic voting is a highly technical subject involving many different areas and subfields of cryptology, some of them heavily number theoretic and mathematical. You are probably not technically knowledgeable enough to pass judgment on such heavily technical subjects in which you are uninformed (or worse, prejudiced against, as evidenced by your choice use of words such as "ideologies").
Even if I'm wrong about you, and you are technically knowledgeable enough to correctly evaluate cryptographic voting systems, it doesn't matter. For every one of you, there are thousands of other voters who are not technically knowledgeable, but who think that they are.
The problem with voting systems is not mathematical. It is not cryptographic. From the point of view of cryptography, secret ballot, end-to-end verifiable voting systems do exist, and have been known for decades. Either a mix net or the Benaloh cryptosystem together with threshold secret sharing delegation of trust is all that is required. The problem with cryptographic end-to-end voting systems is that for every one cryptographer in the world, there are thousands of uninformed members of the general public who don't understand the math, and who think that the scheme is either untrustworthy or that they have found a flaw. For this reason, even if there is a secret ballot, end-to-end verifiable voting system (which there is), it will never be accepted by the general public. As a research scientist, I have had far too much experience in dealing with such obstacles. The public does not trust scientists, even when the scientists clearly know more than they do.