The Vexations Of Voting Machines

Time Mag ^ | Monday, April 26, 2004 | Viveca Novak

[upchuck]

The Vexations Of Voting Machines

Kinks in e-voting systems have given rise to a backlash. Are the machines reliable enough?
By Viveca Novak/Washington

Jeffrey Liss had finished making his selections on Maryland's Democratic-primary ballot and strolled out of the polling place at Chevy Chase Elementary School on the morning of March 2, Super Tuesday. On the sidewalk, he spied a campaign poster for Senator Barbara Mikulski, who is running for her fourth term. Funny, he thought, he didn't remember voting in the Senate race.

Liss went back inside to talk to an election official. And another, and another. He was told he must have overlooked the Senate race on the electronic touch-screen voting machine. But Liss, a lawyer, finally persuaded a technician to check the apparatus. Sure enough, it wasn't displaying the whole ballot.

According to voter complaints collected by Mikulski, who won in the primary, her race didn't appear on ballots in at least three Maryland counties. As a result of snafus like that, a group of voters in the state last week sued to bar use of the machines in November's balloting. And the people of Maryland are not the only ones having second thoughts about electronic voting, the 21st century technology that was supposed to guarantee an end to elections like 2000's, with its outcome depending on subjective calls about hanging and pregnant chads. After that messy conclusion, election officials in 34 states, from Florida to California, purchased so many e-voting machines that some 50 million people, or more than one-third of registered voters, are expected to use them in November. But because of primary-season problems and a general anxiety over sending votes down an electronic black hole, a backlash has set in. Some voter activists, computer scientists and elected officials have joined a growing movement to either make the systems more accountable or pull the plug entirely. Electronic voting is "a rickety system with poor federal and state oversight," says Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. "It has produced an endless stream of bad news." In the most dramatic move against the controversial systems, a state advisory panel urged California secretary of state Kevin Shelley to prohibit the use in this fall's election of 16,000 evoting machines that four counties purchased from Ohio manufacturer Diebold Inc. at a cost of $45 million. Shelley is considering a statewide ban, as is the legislature.

Most critics of e-voting have two complaints. One is that it's not possible to do a true recount with the systems because they produce nothing tangible when a vote is cast; a recount means pressing a button and coming up with the same results. Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the sleek new systems bought by 15 counties — including those of hanging-chad fame like Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade — are unconstitutional because votes can't truly be retallied there, as they can in the rest of the state.

The other concern about evoting is that some of the nation's top computer scientists and code crackers believe the systems are too vulnerable to tampering or simple breakdowns. "If you believe, as I do, that voting is one of our critical infrastructures, then you have to defend it like you do your power grid, your water supply," says former National Security Agency code breaker Michael Wertheimer. "That's not happening anywhere." And with a closely split electorate marching toward another presidential showdown, shaky voter confidence in the results could lead to another huge outcry or keep more people from going to the polls. With voter participation at a paltry 51.3% in 2000, Americans hardly need another reason not to vote.

There are many pluses to the ATM-like machines, most of which are made by three manufacturers. They are easy to use, can provide ballots in many languages and eliminate the problem of voters' choosing more than one candidate in a race. They can also be outfitted to allow disabled people to vote privately for the first time by, for instance, letting blind people use headphones to work through the process. Tests have shown that the machines count votes accurately — when nothing goes wrong.

But things do. Testing in Maryland, which has adopted a system made by Diebold, began to raise eyebrows. The system's potential vulnerability was first pointed out by Bev Harris, a Seattle-based publicist with a deep interest in voting rights and a deep skepticism about digital-age voting (her book, Black Box Voting, is the movement's gospel). Her discovery: the programming behind Diebold's software was available on an open Internet site, which meant that anyone with a little expertise and access to the voting equipment could subvert it. Harris sent the material to others. Soon computer scientists from Johns Hopkins and Rice universities analyzed it, finding a host of security flaws like the presence of critical passwords in the programming. Mischiefmakers who gained access to the smart cards that voters must insert in the machines, or to the machines' memory cards, could use the passwords to cast bogus votes or change tallies. That prompted the state of Maryland to commission a review by research firm SAIC. It agreed that Diebold's system was "at high risk of compromise." Then, four months ago, a state legislative committee hired Wertheimer, the code cracker, and his crew to "red team" the system — assemble it in a mock polling place and try to screw it up.

The experience, Wertheimer says, convinced him that the souls of these new machines were far too corruptible. His team found it possible to vote more than once, physically break into the machines by picking their locks and alter vote totals by dialing into the Diebold server used to relay tallies from precincts to state election officials. The computers that were used to receive results from the precincts had not been given basic security upgrades, leaving them vulnerable to viruses like the notorious Blaster worm. "It's not as if they didn't think enough about security," says Wertheimer. "It's as if they didn't think about it at all." Before the primary, Maryland didn't have time to do much more than alter some passwords and attach to the machines antitamper tape that changes color if someone physically tries to break into them. Officials have required other improvements since then.

In Ohio the debate over evoting has become partisan. Republican secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell ordered each county to pick a state-approved vendor and begin modernizing equipment. Democrats accuse Blackwell of trying to promote his candidacy for Governor by insisting on the changes even as a state legislative committee was studying the machines' reliability. The panel recommended a few weeks ago that the state void all voting-machine contracts and require a newer technology that provides a paper trail of votes cast. Blackwell's spokesman called the committee's move "outrageous and foolish."

California's bad experiences in the March primaries and in last year's gubernatorial recall election are what led secretary of state Shelley to distrust e-voting. In March more than a third of the precincts in San Diego County opened late because the new machines didn't fire up properly, leading many voters to leave in disgust. A study by Diebold of problems with its equipment in Alameda County found that 186 of the 763 encoders used to program the smart cards had failed. As a result of those foul-ups, thousands of voters were disenfranchised in the two counties. Shelley's office concluded in a report released last week that Diebold, the No. 1 provider of evoting machines to California, "jeopardized the outcome" of the March primary.

Diebold apologized for the California snafus, but that may not be enough. The state advisory panel last week recommended that Shelley ask the attorney general to file both criminal and civil charges against the firm. Diebold's chairman, Walden O'Dell, set the company up for recrimination when he wrote in a fund-raising letter to Ohio Republicans last year that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year." O'Dell, who has raised more than $100,000 for President Bush, said he didn't mean that he would use his machines to cheat in the election. But his statement helped fuel mushrooming conspiracy theories that evoting-machine vendors might precook election counts.

Congress's belated reaction to the nightmare of 2000 was the Help America Vote Act, which created the Election Assistance Commission. But because of delays naming and confirming its four members, the panel has only just begun working to provide states with standards and guidance for selecting new voting systems. At its first hearing, on May 5, the commission will probably get an earful about one proposed solution to the problems with e-voting — a voter-verified paper trail. Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist and Harvard research fellow, came up with the idea of having each machine print a small receipt, viewable through clear plastic, that reflects a voter's choices. If it's correct, the voter hits a button, and the receipt disappears into the machine, available for a recount. Several firms are developing such machines. Nevada, the only state so far to require evoting machines to include voter-verified paper trails by November, expects to install ones made by Sequoia Voting Systems. Missouri, Illinois and California are mandating printed receipts by 2006, and many states are considering similar measures. U.S. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, is sponsoring legislation to require the printouts nationwide, and comparable bills await action in the Senate.

But opposition has come from surprising quarters. Some election officials say they are worried about printer jams and other headaches. The toughest resistance comes from disability-rights groups. James Dickson, the vice president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, says electronic machines enfranchise 30 million illiterate, disabled or foreign-language-speaking voters. Requiring a paper trail, even with some technological bells and whistles, he says, would cut out many of those potential voters once again. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is on Dickson's side. So are top officials of the League of Women Voters, though some local chapters are at odds with headquarters on this.

Meanwhile, back in Maryland, Liss is still awaiting satisfaction. He was finally allowed to cast a provisional ballot for the Mikulski race. Then the state refused to count it. Liss filed a petition with the county board of elections and awaits a decision.

[upchuck]

Since I have worked with computers and software for so many years, electronic voting, and the hazards thereof, is a real hot button for me. This article is just one example.

Some links if you're interested:

Legislators Wary of Electronic Voting ^

CA: Ban on voting machine urged - State panel says Diebold glitches tainted primary ^

Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program - By Bev Harris Note the publication date on this, July of 2003. It's not like these idiots didn't have an early warning. This article surgically dissects the Diebold system and all its inherent flaws.

Considering the number of precincts that now have electronic voting machines in place for the Nov, 2004 election, the 2002 election, by comparison, may have been a romp on the beach.

[RonF]

As a network engineer, I am dead set against electronic voting machines.

Here in Illinois, your punch card ballot is sent though a machine that looks for errors. You are told if you voted for more than one candidate in a race, and you are told if you failed to vote for a candidate in a race. You are told this in public, so to preserve confidentiality you are not told which race is involved. You can either take the same ballot back and put it in the punchcard holder, get a new ballot (they tear up the old one), or tell them to use the one you gave them (I don't always vote for all the races if there are unopposed candidates).

[CatoRenasci]

Old fashioned paper ballots and properly secured and watched ballot boxes remain the most reliable method of voting. Slow for getting results, but best for recounts and a clear record of what each voter intended.

[Wisconsin]

These people are working to get it right:
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/

Key ideas:
1. Code is open source and verifiable
2. Voter uses screens to enter vote
3. Ballot is printed, and is verified by voter
4. Ballot is then fed into scanner and retained at voting place (the scanner will be very reliable since the vote is "printed" rather than hand marked.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The Democrats like paper ballots too. They believe that the Republicans have used (and will use) electronic voting machines to steal elections.

There's lots of stuff about this in comp.risks.

[CatoRenasci]

What's your preference?

[Monty22]

Electronic voting systems simply must be open source. Otherwise God knows what is in there, backdoors and so on.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Paper. Electronicly scored paper is OK. One needs an audit trail.

[CatoRenasci]

I don't have a problem with electronic scoring either, but ya' gotta have the audit trail. megadittos

[m1911]

How about dropping "Australian" rules and going back to having your name on the ballot?

[m1911]

A quick Googling found this tidbit, that the North Carolina Democratic Primary was actually done with named ballots. It would have been a bigger deal except Kerry clinched the nomination before they voted.

[BronzePencil]

i sent diebold an email and this was the reply


Thank you for the note. We share your concern about some of the things that have been circulated about Diebold Election Systems. Frankly, there's a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering that's being disseminated in the media. Many computer scientists with an agenda, and conspiracy theorists trying to sell books, are drawing some far-flung conclusions based on what little they know. I don't know of many successful companies who have been in business for 145 years that would risk failure, public criticism, not to mention legal prosecution, by purchasing a small voting systems company (that makes up less than 5% of its global revenue) in order to sabotage elections.
 
In regards to his personal fundraising activity for the GOP, our chairman, Wally O'Dell publicly, and thoroughly, apologized in the Sept. 16 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. 
 
http://www.diebold.com/whatsnews/inthenews/executive.htm
 
Electronic elections auditing and security is a complex, extensive, and multi-layered process which is often not well understood by individuals with little real-world experience in developing or implementing such a process.  Procedures to safeguard against voting inaccuracy at the state and county levels have been in existence much longer than electronic voting, and today are even tougher and more stringent due to the availability of modern electronics -- as well as the scrutiny of the 2000 election.  Unfortunately, there are some who would prefer that our nation's voting processes not move to a more progressive level, and have chosen to engage in a campaign of allegations of negligence or malfeasance against Diebold and other election system companies providing the new technology.  Diebold entered the election systems business knowing that its technology and 144 years of broad experience in security would help ensure the integrity of the vote and accuracy of the election process.
 
The elections business is very different from our traditional business, and any election official will tell you that no voting process is perfect. But, basically, Diebold Election Systems is working hard to go about doing things the right way. Below is a link to our web site that refers to other articles and our responses to some of the criticism. I hope this helps explain where we're coming from. Thanks again for the message.
 
http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/top_stories.htm
 
 

Mike Jacobsen
Diebold, Incorporated
Director, Corporate and Marketing Communications
Ofc.: +1 (330) 490-3796
Mobile: +1 (330) 806-7593

www.diebold.com

[Celtman]

      The old political machines (as in Chicago and Kansas City) would have loved electronic voting machines.  The rest of us should see them for what they are - the end of even semi-verifiable voting. 
      Oklahoma actually has what seems to be a reasonable system.  The voter marks a paper ballot which is then tallied by a machine.  (The system works about like a Scantron.)  The paper ballots, which are held in the machine, can still be counted by hand, if need be.  And there is no "hanging chad."

[Paleo Conservative]

Old fashioned paper ballots and properly secured and watched ballot boxes remain the most reliable method of voting.

Optically scannable ballots are just as good. They can be quickly and reliably scanned and counted by computer, but are easily counted by people too.