Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon (theregister.co.uk)

Following the DefCon demonstration in July that showed how quickly Direct Recording Electronic voting equipment could be hacked, Virginia's State Board of Elections has decided it wants to replace their electronic voting machines in time for the gubernatorial election due on November 7th, 2017. According to The Register, "The decision was announced in the minutes of the Board's September 8th meeting: 'The Department of Elections officially recommends that the State Board of Elections decertify all Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or touchscreen) voting equipment." From the report: With the DefCon bods showing some machines shared a single hard-coded password, Virginia directed the Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) to audit the machines in use in the state (the Accuvote TSX, the Patriot, and the AVC Advantage). None passed the test. VITA told the board "each device analyzed exhibited material risks to the integrity or availability of the election process," and the lack of a paper audit trail posed a significant risk of lost votes. Local outlet The News Leader notes that many precincts had either replaced their machines already, or are in the process of doing so. The election board's decision will force a change-over on the 140 precincts that haven't replaced their machines, covering 190,000 of Virginia's ~8.4m population.

Comments

We had paper ballots here in Virginia Beach

[fahrbot-bot]

In my Virginia Beach precinct, we had electronic voting machines a while ago, but have had paper -- fill in the bubble, then scanned -- ballots for the past several years including the 2016 election. The ballots are scanned on their way into the locked ballot box. This system is easier and faster than the electronic versions were, plus there's a paper trail.

Re:We had paper ballots here in Virginia Beach

[hey!]

I have a theory why some districts may prefer voting machines to electronically scanned paper ballots. Voting machines make it possible to manipulate election results without actually hacking the machines themselves. You just have to hack the wait times in districts unfavorable to you. Lest that seem far-fetched, note that studies have shown that waits in minority-dominated precincts are on average almost twice that of white districts.

For the price of a single voting machine you can put up a dozen of those cheap pop-up voting booths. This means the marginal cost of scaling up an overloaded precinct's capacity is extremely low. I live in a state that uses scanned paper ballots, and the voting places have so many booths that in 45 years of voting I've never had to wait more than five minutes to vote -- and that's for checking in with the elderly volunteers. There's always free booths, no matter how heavy the turnout.

Manual counting only in Norway last night

[Terje Mathisen]

Here in Norway we just had a general election last night:

Just 2-3 weeks ago Jan T Sanner, the minister with responsibility for elections, decided that every single vote had to be counted manually, including all early voting ballots. Previously those votes had been counted using optical scanners but with the news about how hackable most voting machines have turned out to be, he decided that we won't trust them.

Voting booths closed at 21:00 and the trend (our current prime minister will almost certainly get another 4 years) was immediately clear even though many of the details were less settled. This is mainly due to our voting setup with 169 representatives from 19 counties, where each party is supposed to get a total number which corresponds as closely as possible to the total vote counts, but with a cutoff of 4.0%: If a party gets less than that they will not get any of the final 19 slots which goes to the parties which have gotten too few direct representatives.

This morning at 07:00 we had passed 95% of total votes counted and a couple of the smaller parties had just managed to lift safely above the 4.0% cutoff point, so now the result is for all practical purposes final.

The key idea is that in all countries with "one person - one vote" the effort needed to do a full manual count (which is actually a dual count and verification) is exactly proportional to the size of the country, so it should be just as easy to do this in the US as in Norway!

Terje

Re:Why americans don't care?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

We use first-past-the-post voting, for a single representative, which Duverger's Law tells us inevetably results in a two-party system. In other words, the two-party problem is systemic and isn't going to go away simply by wishing it would, or especially, by voting for some quixotic can't-possibly-win third-party candidate, on the theory that that will somehow change things.

The attack vector for that

[Anonymous Coward]

These bubble counting machines themselves have an attack vector that's been well exploited.

In Florida, they did an analysis of faulty misaligned ballot counters and there was a statically higher number of mis-calibrated counting machines in Democrat districts. Those machines rejected votes as invalid that were valid.

Really, lots of people, done under surveillance of representatives of the candidates standing for vote is the way to do vote counting.

When you have elections run by political groups, you have opportunities for corruption of the voting system.