Georgia Defends Electronic Voting Machines Despite 243-Percent Turnout In One Precinct (arstechnica.com)

"In Chicago, it used to be claimed that even death couldn't stop a person from voting," writes Slashdot reader lunchlady55. "But in the Deep South, there are new reports of discrepancies in voter turnout with the approval of new electronic voting systems." Ars Technica reports: [I]f any state is a poster child for terrible election practices, it is surely Georgia. Bold claims demand bold evidence, and unfortunately there's plenty; on Monday, McClatchy reported a string of irregularities from the state's primary election in May, including one precinct with a 243-percent turnout.

McClatchy's data comes from a federal lawsuit filed against the state. In addition to the problem in Habersham County's Mud Creek precinct, where it appeared that 276 registered voters managed to cast 670 ballots, the piece describes numerous other issues with both voter registration and electronic voting machines. (In fact it was later corrected to show 3,704 registered voters in the precinct.) Multiple sworn statements from voters describe how they turned up at their polling stations only to be turned away or directed to other precincts. Even more statements allege incorrect ballots, frozen voting machines, and other issues. "George is one of four states in the U.S. that continues to use voting machines with no ability to provide voters a paper record so that they can verify the machine counted their vote correctly," the report adds.

Comments

What good is the paper?

[jfdavis668]

The machine could be faulty, print out exactly who you voted for, yet still record your vote wrong. How would having a piece of paper help? You can't go back and change your vote.

Re:What good is the paper?

[Anonymous Coward]

The machine also doesn't store the votes. Each voter gets a single card as he walks in and has to return it to the pollsters as he walks out.

Re: What good is the paper?

[ShanghaiBill]

Assuming you get to keep the paper, it makes it possible to audit the results to a much higher degree of certainty.

Not really. It is just a receipt, not a list of who/what you voted for. You can use it to confirm that your vote was counted, but not that the vote was recorded correctly, nor that additional fake ballots were not also counted.

Opponents of electronic voting talk about "paper ballots" like they are some magical thing than ensures fair elections. That is nonsense.

It is easy to have a verified vote.

It is easy to have a secret vote.

It is very, very difficult to have both.

Re: What good is the paper?

[currently_awake]

Make your choices on the computer. Print out ballot. Verify choices printed. If wrong do over or complain. Once satisfied put ballot into ballot box to be counted. There is no need to have the computer count the votes or transmit them to a central location or be connected to a network.

Re:What good is the paper?

[cervesaebraciator]

My voting place just uses plain scantron like paper ballots. Fill in the oval, stick it in the machine, done. Keep all the ballots for at least 8 years or something, and if you ever need to verify the vote, take them out and check them by hand. (This assumes they are stored securely.) [...] While I could design something secure that uses touch screens and such, I still wouldn't trust it as much as this plain simple system. Sometimes simple wins. I doubt your going to improve on this design much, no matter how much you try to do so.

+1. People miss the importance of expense and effort. The important thing isn't that a system like this can't be compromised. It's that it is much, much more cumbersome to compromise it than an electronic system. It also has the deterrent effect of leaving a fair bit of evidence (paper trail, numerous co-conspirators needed, etc.) that it has been compromised.

Re:What good is the paper?

[Anonymous Coward]

The machine also doesn't store the votes. Each voter gets a single card as he walks in and has to return it to the pollsters as he walks out.

That's not correct.
The token you hand in does not contain your vote for an obvious reason. It used only to verify that the number of votes cast is the number of votes recorded, and that the voter is a valid voter (having been given the token).

The voting machine store the votes cast on that machine, and the votes are extracted from the voting machines locally to a memory card after the polls close. Each counties memory cards are taken to a tabulation computer (not internet connected) that reads the voting machines memory cards and tabulates the totals. The tabulation machine's totals are then put on a memory card and loaded into an internet connected server that uploads the totals to the State of Georgia's central server.
The memory cards are encrypted with a unique key for each county so the state knows that the upload is from a valid device.
No voting machine is ever connected to the Internet. Actually, I'm fairly sure they are never connected to any network.
The totals are uploaded to the States web server where it is published for anyone to see, and also for each counties voting commissioner to verify that their counties votes are recorded correctly by the state. There is considerable detail in the result spread sheets.
general results:
http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/63991/184321/en/summary.html
detailed results by county, type of ballot (provisional, advance, absentee, polling place):
http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/63991/184321/en/reports.html#

There are some obvious holes in the system.
For each election, the local county downloads a config file from the state that contains what election, who is running, the screen layouts etc.
Then the local county manually installs that onto each voting machine using memory cards. At some point the memory card used to update the voting machines is placed in a computer that has shared a device with a computer that is connected to the internet. So if the internet connected computer is infected, then it could infect the memory card used to update the voting machines.

Also, if a voting machine is bricked, then the votes from that machine are irrecoverably lost.
This happened frequently when using mechanical voting machines back in the Jim Crow days, but usually only machines in the polling places of Black neighborhoods would fail.

Also, the other thing about electronic voting machines is that every voter has physical access. If no one is watching, a person could break into the voting machine (they do have a lock), connect a memory card and load malware. or brick it.

Re: What good is the paper?

[whoever57]

That's how it works where I vote.

Fill out paper ballot, it is then scanned and kept. I can't audit that my vote was accurately counted, but an audit can be done globally.

Re: What good is the paper?

[phantomfive]

Where do you get the idea of human vote counters being a huge vulnerability/risk?

Basically from a long history of humans manipulating the vote.

Re: What good is the paper?

[AmiMoJo]

Voting is one of the few times that a blockchain could actually make things better.

You vote on the computer and get a receipt with a secret transaction ID on it. You can then verify your vote against the public blockchain any time you like using that transaction ID (which is anonymous), and anyone can verify the overall count and integrity of the chain too.

Some care will be required to make sure the votes remain anonymous. The most obvious risk is correlating people's visits to the polling station with transactions on the blockchain, but there are ways to prevent that.

Re: What good is the paper?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's no longer a truly anonymous vote.

Consider: How does your proposed scheme prevent someone threatening me unless I give them the receipt that proves I voted the way they wanted me to?

Re:What good is the paper?

[RavenLrD20k]

Also, if a voting machine is bricked, then the votes from that machine are irrecoverably lost.

12 years ago I did a few rounds as an election tech in GA shortly after they first started using the electronic machines. Back then the machines had the capability to each print out a record of votes counted with a built-in printer that had memory independent from the unit's main memory. This was done so there was still a way to retrieve the votes from the machine both as a fail-safe if the machine became disabled as well as an audit trail in case of discrepancies. It was a matter of procedure that the precincts had to generate the "receipt" print-out from each machine and send them into the county Board of Elections office with the memory card and stack of tokens so the officials could make sure there was at least a card for each vote according to the printed totals. While they did that, I was inserting the memory card and dialing up the Secretary of State server for the uploads.

Re: What good is the paper?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Paper ballots have all kinds of problems, though, including people marking two different candidates,

This at least shifts the source of the problem to 'idiot who marks two candidates' and away from 'random programmer somewhere unknowable, who can do unverifiable things to the software.'

and sometimes needing recounts.

This is a feature, and a very desirable feature at that.

Re:What good is the paper?

[rtb61]

Once you add in electronics, tranparency dissapears. The only sound way to vote, get ballot, get pencil, put 'X' in appropriate box, put ballot in poll box. After voting over, representatives from those running for the election along with government officers, open each box, one at a time, empty out and count each ballot individual, with representatives from each person running for the election checking each and every vote. Voting is about people, not machine. The one and only reason for electronic voting is mass voter fraud, last election was so bad, even when recounts were paid for they were actively blocked. US voting is a corrupt as any third world tin pot dictator voting and it's not Russia hacking, it's the deep state and shadow government hacking.

Obligatory xkcd

[Ly4]

Obligatory:
https://xkcd.com/2030/

Re:Obligatory xkcd

[SirAstral]

It is very much worth noting that the problem with the XKCD article is comparing Aircraft and Elevator safety with Software... why? Because of the law. If you design a bad machine and people die you can be very easily sued out of existence or go to jail. Just imagine that every plane and elevator had a sign posted saying, ride at your own risk because we are not responsible for a malfunction taking your limbs or life... a lot of folks would be taking the stairs and driving places instead.

Write software and you just say, not responsible for my shitty work because we have no standards for expediency and cost purposes.

Changing the law so that software is not allowed to escape a law suit with a simple tos agreement would change a whole farking load of things.

"I don't quiet know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die."

Making the field as culpable for its fuck up like manufacturers would change that shit real fucking fast. Shit programmers would be tossed very quickly and several of those "awesome" programmers able to cut corners super fast would fall from grace with some epic face plants into the concrete below.

The problem with election commissions

[Darinbob]

The problemwith election commissions in the US are that they don't care so much about accuracy as they do about the budget and keeping drama to a minimum. So when they see a report of a clearly impossible number, their first instinct is not to investigate and see how this happened and try to correct it. Their first action is to try and make the perception of the problem go away, thus reducing the chance of drama occuring (recounts, bad press, the wrong party winning, etc).

So when the predicted problems with electronic voting machines showed up it was also predicatable that excuses would be made: we're out of budget since we just bought these election machines; at least they're better than the butterfly ballots; we'll look into it, honest; and "look, a Squirrel!!"

I think we could make electronic voting secure

[rsilvergun]

I also think we don't want to. America is not and has never been a Democracy. And no, I don't mean "We're a Republic". Our entire political system (most notably the Senate and the Electoral college) is built to lesson the effects of Democracy and disenfranchise the 'wrong' type of voter.

Why not just count them?

[hawguy]

Why not just count paper ballots like Canada does? Each precinct tallies up their counts and reports them upstream where they are aggregated. The manual counts are supervised by representatives from each party. Publish all of the counts and subtotals so they can be verified. Even if there are a 100 million ballots to count, by distributing the work, it can still be done in a timely manner.

Re:Why not just count them?

[SirSlud]

The US is founded on the principle that if there's a right way to do something, they have the freedom to also do it 49 worse ways.

Washington state is all paper ballots

[93 Escort Wagon]

We are 100% vote by mail.

I actually miss going to a polling place, though. It made voting and democracy seem very real, somehow.

Never forget

[PopeRatzo]

Habersham County’s Mud Creek

Mud Creek is overwhelmingly one party. It is the same party as the Secretary of State, who is now running for governor of Georgia. He's being sued for disenfranchising minority voters, elderly voters and young voters. I'm going to let you guys guess which party it is. Here's a hint: it's the party that is constantly crying about voter fraud that doesn't exist.

Also, to the AC in this comments thread who redundantly posts that it was actually 670 voters of 3,704 registered voters, you should know that on election day, the aforementioned Secretary of State's own website showed that Mud Creek only had 276 registered voters. Magically after 670 votes were cast in Mud Creek, the Secretary of State's website was changed to say that there were actually 3,704 registered voters and not 276 as previously stated. Mud Creek's total population as of the 2010 census was fewer than 2,000 souls (men, women and children).

Re:Never forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Mud Creek voting district is not the same as the Mud Creek census area. In this case it is the name of one of the five voting precincts in Habersham county.

What happened is that Habersham county changed the voting districts twice in the last few years. It went from 14 to 2 and then in 2016 to 5 voting precincts.
In the 2016 election, Habersham county had 20,380 registered voters of which 13,890 actually voted. Voting districts tend to be areas containing the same number of people, so a fifth of 20,380 registered is about 4,166, and a fifth of 13,890 would be about 2,778.

The 276 on the state's web server is was probably left over from when Habersham county had 14 precincts or may be just a typo. That number is supposed to get updated by the local people. The low turnout is due to the fact that it was a primary election.

Today's XKCD is relevant here

[raymorris]

https://xkcd.com/2030/

RTA, here's what happened to the 'Georgia' evidenc

[Anonymous Coward]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/days-after-activists-sued-georgias-election-server-was-wiped-clean/

They wiped the drive and degaussed it two days after a lawsuit demanding the data was filed. Suspicious as fuck. What the investigator found was the voting information was public, together with passwords, login details for the machines. In other words, anyone could set any election result and they had no way of verifying it.

I'll say it again, don't show "unity" over the result of the vote, challenge it, force checks and verification until there is no reasonable doubt possible over the result. You only need one fraudulent election to lose a democracy forever, because all subsequent elections will be fraudulent.

It's worth the effort to challenge and verify the data. "One man one vote", not "One Russian hacker, one million votes".

Idea how to do robust electronic voting

[CptJeanLuc]

Here is how one could set up electronic voting. The challenge: votes are anonymous, but transparency in the voting process is needed. How to handle both. Here is the process as I see it:

TL;DR: A public ledger of non-person-identifiable votes that were cast, a system for voters to identify "their" vote and prove whether it was registered correctly, as well as a public register of who casted votes (the vote is still secret) in order to help prevent fake votes from being cast. All enabled through some randomness and cryptographic signatures.

• There needs to be a public register of "who voted". Though voting is anonymous, the fact that you voted does not need to be. This enables accountability because the system cannot produce "fake votes" without significant risk, as they have to produce a person for each vote that is case, and this can be checked later.
• You enter the voting booth. You select your vote (candidate X, abstain, pro/con Brexit, ...).
• The system gives you a (very long) unique receipt number for the vote. You have to add some digits to that number yourself (so the system is not allowed to cheat in choosing a number). The resulting number becomes the "vote ID" for that vote.
• Upon confirming the vote, the system signs the vote (vote ID + vote), and provides a signature to the voter (also available in the form of e.g. a QR code), signed with a private key for that voting maching (which is at the end point of some trust chain). Also, it provides a signature of only vote ID
• If the voter wants, (s)he could e.g. use a mobile app to scan the signatures, to store them and to verify it has been signed, as proof that the signature is valid, so that it can be used as proof that (a) the vote was delivered (vote ID only), or that a vote was cast in a particular way (vote ID + vote).
• The vote ID, the vote and the signatures are printed as a paper receipts for the voter and for the vote handling organization, to ensure there is a paper trail that cannot be tampered with. If tree hugging is an issue, print on recycled diapers or something like that. Voters are requested to retain their receipt (helpful in case of later having to do some random checking of the integrity of the election).
• When voting ends, all votes are published publically in the form of (vote ID + vote). This allows counting votes and identifying unique votes, however only the voters know which vote is his/her vote.
• There is now accountability, because voters can find "their" vote in the ledger, and check whether it has tracked the correct vote. If not, they have proof (in the form of a cryptographic signature) that it is invalid.
• Post-election, notifications are sent to all registered voters, that they have been registered in the system (which helps prevent fraud that people are casting votes in your name, in the name of dead people, etc)

So this kind of setup would make it very risky to try to generate fake votes, as well as allowing the integrity of the votes to be verified after the fact.

Not bad for 5 minutes of thinking (plus some time to refine the idea while typing it up). I am sure some really smart heads could cook up something even better, but this is already miles beyond whatever they have going on in Georgia.

Re:100% the Dims' fault

[fafalone]

Maybe if Republicans weren't doing things like placing all the ID places in wealthier areas, poorly reachable by public transport from less wealthy areas, open only during weekday business hours, requiring a not-trivial-to-the-poor fee, disallowing comparble non-state IDs less likely to be possessed by whites, their voter ID whinging wouldn't get shot down as transparently racist.
If you're willing to reform those problems across the country, *then* we can talk about voter ID. Also the right has yet to present any evidence of large scale illegal alien voter fraud.

Re:Difference Teaches

[Anonymous Coward]

During Ww2 they had a saying .
When the Germans shoot, the British duck.
When the British shoot, the Germans duck.
When the Americans shoot, everybody ducks.