Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by BeauHD on from the something-doesn't-add-up-here dept.

"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.

9 of 431 comments (clear)

  1. What good is the paper? by jfdavis668 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re: What good is the paper? by currently_awake · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:What good is the paper? by cervesaebraciator · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:What good is the paper? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:What good is the paper? by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Why not just count them? by hawguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Why not just count them? by SirSlud · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "Old man yells at systemd"
  3. Re:Never forget by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. RTA, here's what happened to the 'Georgia' evidenc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".