Electronic voting may pose risks

[gristy]

From today's Salt Lake Tribune

http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Aug/08052003/utah/81360.asp

What is so amazing is that Utah's Lt. Gov is parroting what I keep hearing repeated over and over and over again.

<snip>
Lt. Gov. Olene Walker, Utah's election boss, understands the concerns but notes the new voting technology has worked well so far. Electronic voting machines have been used across the nation without a hiccup, she says.
"Nobody ever reported any problems or any fraud, and that sort of debunks the worries," Walker says.
<snip>

No problems? No fraud? Apparently Walker keeps his head safely parked up his you-know-where.

If it hasn't been done before, maybe this thread could be used to compile a list (preferably with links) of the real documented problems associated with electronic voting machines. Conflicts of interest count as real problems, in my view. Actual vote percentages coming out different from polled percentages only count, IMO, if documented as a complete statistical summary of ALL races in a given election cycle. And when the poll was taken needs to be taken into account, too. Was it before or after Rick Kahn's speech at the Wellstone Memorial?

[SharonAnn]

1. Well, shoot, the deal is that you can't "prove" anything on these

machines. you can't prove it's an honest election and you can't prove it's fraudulent.

So there you are!

[qb]

2. It sounds like they're all reading from the same "Talking Points"

They must have been mailed out by Diebold.

[Zan_of_Texas]

4. List of problems in the mid-term electinos

Bev Harris' website lists the following, just for the mid-terms.

http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=12


GHOST PRECINCTS: Now this is really scary —* A Florida woman, a former news reporter, discovered that votes were being tabulated in 644 Palm Beach precincts, but only 643 precincts have any eligible voters. An earlier court case in Florida found the same discrepancy, and the reason for it was never satisfactorily explained.



* A reporter in New Jersey observed 104 precincts with votes in an area that has only 102 precincts. "Ghost precincts" — no matter what the official explanation — do not provide the transparent accounting needed to protect voting integrity."

COMPUTER COUNTING PROBLEMS* No one at ES&S can explain the mystery votes that changed after polling places had closed, flipping the election from the Democratic winner to a Republican in the Alabama Governor's race. "Something happened. I don't have enough intelligence to say exactly what," said Mark Kelley, of Election Systems & Software. Baldwin County results showed that Democrat Don Siegelman earned enough votes to win the state of Alabama. All the observers went home. The next morning, however, 6,300 of Siegelman's votes inexplicably disappeared, and the election was handed to Republican Bob Riley. A recount was requested, but denied. The "glitch" is still being examined. (By a citizens group?) No. (By a judge?) No. (By an independent computer expert?) No. (By someone who works for ES&S?) Yes.

* A software programming error overturned the result: In North Carolina, a software programming error caused vote-counting machines to skip over several thousand party-line votes, both Republican and Democratic. Machines aren't supposed to get past quality control, and certainly not past certification, and definitely not past pretesting, if their programming is so flawed. But everyone seemed to yawn. Fixing the error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed the election.


* California machines that can't add: The problem in Monterey, California was that the department's mainframe computers refused to add the results of early absentee votes and those cast on touch-screen computers prior to Election Day. "We didn't have any problems whatsoever during our pre-election tests," said the elections official.


* This crushing defeat never happened: Vote-counting machines failed to tally "yes" votes on the Gretna school-bond issue (Nebraska), giving the false impression that the measure failed miserably. The measure actually passed by a 2-1 margin. Responsibility for the errors was attributed to ES&S, the Omaha company that provided the ballots and the machines.


* Double-counting votes in South Dakota: Blamed on "flawed chip." ES&S sent a replacement chip; voter demanded that the original chip be impounded and examined. Who gets to examine it? ES&S.


* A software programming error of 55 percent: In South Carolina, and it caused more than 21,000 votes in the squeaker-tight race for S.C. commissioner of agriculture to be uncounted; only a hand-count was able to sort it out. Good thing there were paper ballots.


* A software programming error caused machine to count the wrong names: In Taos, New Mexico just 25 votes separated the candidates in one race; another race had a 79-vote margin. After noticing that the computer was counting votes under the wrong names, Taos County Clerk Jeannette Rael contacted the programmer of the optical machine and was told it was a software programming error. The votes were then hand-counted.


* Nearly a day later, no votes were counted in Adams County. A software programming error from ES&S caused the problem, County Election Commissioner Chris Lewis said. Attempts to clear up the problem, including using a backup machine, failed. The problem affected at least 12,000 ballots. "The irony is they had one of the newest pieces of voting equipment in the state," said Nebraska Secretary of State John Gale."


* One hundred percent error tabulating Libertarian votes: In Pennsylvania, a voter reported that he had followed his conscience and voted Libertarian. When he reviewed the results for his precinct, though, the Libertarian candidate received zero votes. Two ways to look at this: Unimportant, just a vote; or, a 100 percent error. Either way, why bother to vote?


* Only 103,000 votes went missing in Florida, and only 91,000 voters were wrongfully purged from the rolls. Though there is no paper trail, officials assure us that the counts were correct. And the purged voters get their votes back — after the election is over.


* Voting machine tallies impounded in New York: Software programming errors hampered and confused the vote tally on election night and most of the next day, causing elections officials to pull the plug on the vote-reporting web site. Commissioners ordered that the voting machine tallies be impounded, and they were guarded overnight by a Monroe County deputy sheriff.


* "I can't say every precinct had a problem, but the vast majority did" -- Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana Clerk of Court John Dahmer said at least 20 percent of the machines in his parish malfunctioned. "One percent might be acceptable, but we're not even close to that," Dahmer said. He said 15 employees worked to combat the malfunctions.


* Vote Republican (read "Democrat") — In Maryland, a software programming error upset a lot of voters when they saw a banner announcing "Democrat" at the top of their screen, no matter who they voted for.


* Forty-four of 46 machines malfunction in New Jersey: Election workers had to turn away up to 100 early voters when it was discovered that 96 percent of the voting machines couldn't register votes for the Mayor, despite having the machines pre-tested and certified for use.


* Trying to find 300 voters so they can vote again: In North Carolina, one out of four new touch-screen voting machines failed in early voting, losing 294 votes. The machines were shut down before Election Day, so election workers looked for the 294 voters to ask them to vote again. (A paper trail would have solved this problem.)


* McBride was a tough guy to vote for: One voter said that he tried 10 times, and every time he pressed McBride the Bush choice lit up. He could only get his vote to light up the McBride choice when he pressed a dead area of the screen. No paper trail was available, so no one really knows who got any of the votes — regardless of which candidate lit up. Similar problems were reported in various permutations, for various candidates, by several Florida voters, and an identical problem was noted in Texas.


* "What the hell do I do with this?" — A bag full of something that looked like rolls of cash register tapes was handed to the County Clerk. A computer "irregularity" in a New Jersey vote-counting system caused three of five relay stations to fail, leaving a single county clerk holding the bag for a hand count.


* More than 200 machine malfunctions reported in Ascension Parish (Louisiana): An elections official gnashed his teeth as more than 200 machine malfunctions were called in. The Parish Clerk said his staff was on the road repairing machines from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. In one case, a machine wasn't repaired until 12:30 a.m. Wednesday. "A mechanic would fix a machine, and before he could get back to the office, it would shut down again," Bourque said.


* When all else fails, use duct tape: In Sarpy County, Nebraska, they used duct tape to stick a block of wood under the machine — that's the only way it would feed votes through.


* All the king's horses and all the king's men…couldn't put the tally together again: With a 34-vote margin separating the two justice of the peace candidates in St. Bernard Parish (Louisiana), the machine ate 35 absentee votes and left everyone guessing about the outcome of the race. The ballots became inaccessible when the system locked up; even the technician couldn't get at them.


* Problems in Georgia: In one Georgia county ballots in at least three precincts listed the wrong county commission races. Officials shut down the polls to fix the problem but didn't know how many wrong ballots were cast or how to correct errant votes. In another, a county commission race was omitted from a ballot. Cards voters need to access machines malfunctioned. Elsewhere, machines froze up and dozens were had software programming errors.


* In Ohio, a vote-counting machine malfunctioned with 12 of the county's 67 precincts left to count. A back-up vote-counting machine was found, but it also could not read the vote. Election workers piled into a car and headed to another county to tally their votes.


* Two South Carolina precincts working to extract information from the computer: Pickens County was unable to get totals from two precincts because of software programming errors.

* Georgia officials forgot where they put their memory cards: Fulton County election officials said that memory cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals. No hand count can shine any light on this; the entire state of Georgia went to touch-screen machines with no physical record of the vote. Fifty-six cards, containing 2,180 ballots, were located, but 11 memory cards still were missing Thursday evening. Bibb County and Glynn County each had one card missing after the initial vote count. When DeKalb County election officials went home early Wednesday morning, they were missing 10 cards.


* Candidate for governor finds vote-counting computer asleep: I spoke with Paul Rosberg, the Nebraska Party candidate for governor, who told me he eagerly took advantage of a Nebraska law that lets candidates watch their votes being counted. He first was invited to watch an optical scanner machine, which had no counter on it, and then was taken into the private room, where he was allowed to watch a computer on a table with a blank screen. So much for public counting of votes.


* Candidate declared victory prematurely: New Mexico candidate Heather Wilson declared herself the victor and made a speech, even though the margin was only 51:49 and votes weren't fully counted. First reports explained that "thousands of new votes had been found but not counted." Later, when thousands of new votes were not discovered after all, the reason for her victory premonition was changed to an influx of uncounted absentee votes, 2:1 for Wilson.

[gristy]

5. thanks Zan - nice list!

That really is a good summary.
I sure wish some of these had links to published reports. Many head-in-the-sand state officials (though not all of them) want back-up.

[gristy]

3. So maybe I'm sort of asking the wrong question?

Is Walker's statement simply irrelevant?

What about this as a counter-argument to Walker's statement:

The process of casting and, more importantly, counting votes, being the lifeblood of our democracy, must be such that it is possible to detect any and all errors AND to correct any and all detected errors. Complexity should be allowed only if it is too expensive to eliminate AND it does not INCREASE the possibility of failure or fraud AND if it does not DEGRADE the public's confidence in the validity of the election results. As documented in this link: (someone tell me - what is best link?), DRE/touch-screen voting systems such as those from Diebold are therefor deemed NOT ACCEPTABLE.

[Zan_of_Texas]

6. documented in this link

Here ya go:

http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf

This is the paper entitled "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System," by Tadayoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield, Aviel D. Rubin and Dan Wallach, was released July 24, 2003.  (The first three authors are at Johns Hopkins University; Wallach is at Rice).  

The authors have done a security analysis of Diebold code that was downloaded from an open FTP site earlier this year.  While the paper is technical, significant portions of it can be read easily by a non-computer scientist.

An article about the paper appeared in the New York Times on Thursday, July 25, 2003. (Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say, by JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html?pagewanted=print&position=)


Conclusions from Analysis of an Electronic Voting System

Using publicly available source code, we performed an analysis of a voting machine. This code was apparently developed by a company that sells to states and other municipalities that use them in real elections.  We found significant security flaws: voters can trivially cast multiple ballots with no built-in traceability, administrative functions can be performed by regular voters, and the threats posed by insiders such as poll workers, software developers, and even janitors, is even greater. Based on our analysis of the development environment, including change logs and comments, we believe that an appropriate level of programming discipline for a project such as this was not maintained. In fact, there appears to have been little quality control in the process.

For quite some time, voting equipment vendors have maintained that their systems are secure, and that the closed-source nature makes them even more secure. Our glimpse into the code of such a system reveals that there is little difference in the way code is developed for voting machines relative to other commercial endeavors. In fact, we believe that an open process would result in more careful development, as more scientists, software engineers, political activists, and others who value their democracy would be paying attention to the quality of the software that is used for their elections. (Of course, open source would not solve all of the problems with electronic elections. It is still important to verify somehow that the binaries running in the machine correspond to the source code and that the compilers used on the source code are non-malicious.  However, open source is a good start.) Such open design processes have proven successful in projects ranging from very focused efforts, such as specifyin g the Advanced Encryption Standard, through very large and complex systems such as maintaining the Linux operating system.

Alternatively, security models such as the voter-verified audit trail allow for electronic voting systems that produce a paper trail that can be seen and verified by a voter. In such a system, the correctness burden on the voting terminal’s code is less extreme because voters can see and verify a physical object that embodies their vote. Even if, for whatever reason, the machines cannot name the winner of an election, then the paper ballots can be recounted, either mechanically or manually, to gain progressively more accurate election results.

The model where individual vendors write proprietary code to run our elections appears to be unreliable, and if we do not change the process of designing our voting systems, we will have no confidence that our election results will reflect the will of the electorate. We owe it to ourselves and to our future to have robust, well-designed election systems to preserve the bedrock of our democracy.

[Zan_of_Texas]

7. Just my opinion

Okay. You have 1000 technology people who say the stuff they work on day in and day out is unable to be made foolproof enough and secure enough to trust our elections to, without some backup, like a paper ballot alongside the electronic one. (see www.verifiedvoting.org)

In my humble opinion, asking for proof of electronic ballot problems, as configured now, is like asking murdered people to testify against their murderers. These machines basically tell no tales -- there is only one answer, and it is theirs. That is why it is so perfect for stealing votes.

Because they are still phasing them in, and because incompetence seems to be everywhere, they still can't even get them to boot up, or even SEEM to be recording the votes properly sometimes. Sometimes the votes don't add up. My fear is that in a few years, if they have a few years, the "glitches" will diminish, and EVERYone will think they are just dandy.

So easy to use too!

Right. Using mental telepathy to cast your vote is easy too, but is it working? How can you tell?

[gristy]

8. Just got off the phone with an assistant in the Utah Elections Office

That would be an assistant in the office of Amy Naccarato (801-538-1041), Director of Elections.

Man, what a frustrating 20 minutes. First, we talked about Lt. Gov. Walker's assertion that "Nobody ever reported any problems or any fraud". I asked if Lt. Gov Walker (R) really believed that. She said that if she said it, she must believe it. So I mentioned many of the reported problems that Zan listed in this thread. She listened, and said if I wanted I could put them all in a letter and send them to the Lt. Gov. I then went on and on about the difficulty in making a fail-safe and error-recoverable system as complex as these DRE voting systems are. In response, she went on and on about all the studies the state had done, and how the DRE voting systems are certified in a "very impressive process" and how their bipartisan State Plan Committee had vetted all the state's studies and had voted to authorize the purchase of DRE systems, as stated in their State Plan. I really cut her off when she started to explain to me what a State Plan is...

OMG, their belief that we the public are just total idiots is just overwhelming. These folks are completely in cover-your-ass mode.

Anybody from Utah out there?

[Karenina]

9. "MAY" pose risks

Has everybody in Amurikka drunk from da "STUPID" cup or what? "MAY" pose risks???
:argh: :argh: :argh: :argh: :argh: :argh: