NEW YORK'S BACK DOOR TO THE BALLOT BOX

[Wilms]

NEW YORK'S BACK DOOR TO THE BALLOT BOX

by Howard Stanislevic

August 17, 2008

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(I)n 2008 in the State of New York, some disabled voters whom HAVA was intended to help may be putting their votes at risk, even if their ballots are counted by hand. And in 2009, they may have a lot of company. This is because at least one electronic vote-counting system, to be used only as an accessible ballot marking device (BMD) this year in dozens of counties in the state, features a low-tech way to corrupt even a rigorous post-election audit procedure or a full hand count: an old fashioned stuffable ballot box.

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To date, we are not aware of any other open-ended vulnerability, security or penetration testing of the Sequoia/Dominion ImageCast machine, but clearly, it is only too easy to penetrate with low-tech methods such as ballot box stuffing. New York will be hand-counting the BMD ballots this year, instead of relying on software-driven optical scanners which have thus far exhibited hundreds of discrepancies in their source-code reviews against the 2005 federal Voluntary Voting System Guidelines that the state requires voting systems to meet as part of its certification process. But even a full hand count cannot compensate for a stuffed paper ballot box!

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Until now, stuffing ballot boxes at elections in New York was thought to be a thing of the past, thanks to our decades-old, yet reliable lever voting machines. We can only guess what other “back doors” may exist in the proprietary, unobservable, undetectably mutable ImageCast software, but if this obviously shoddy hardware design is any indication, it could be the tip of the iceberg. New Yorkers therefore need to think twice before actually allowing their votes to be counted on such machines.

Professor Bryan Pfaffenberger of the University of Virginia Dept. of Science, Technology & Society was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study the lever voting machine. In Machining the Vote, he defends levers, which were designed with an eye toward preventing paper ballot fraud:

"Having studied the history, I strongly believe that there would be no such call for paper if the ugly history of fraudulent practices enabled by paper ballots were known -- unfortunately, the American people have forgotten the lessons they learned a century ago, and I greatly fear that we will have to repeat them in order to learn them again."

"In my analysis, the lever machine deserves recognition as one of the most astonishing achievements of American technological genius, a fact that is reflected in their continued competitiveness against recent voting technologies in every accepted performance measure."

Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips, who like Rady Ananda, and unlike many armchair investigators and pontificators, has first-hand experience investigating the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio, wrote in a recent essay entitled: In Defense of Lever Machines,

"I simply will not defend the use of paper ballots if they are transported to another location before they are counted. I would much rather have lever machines counted at the polling place than any system, paper or paperless, counted elsewhere."

Some may claim that software-driven "precinct-count" optical scanners fulfill this requirement, but how do we know that the paper ballots will in fact be counted correctly by these special-purpose trusted computing devices? (Hint: we don't!)

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And as e-voting expert Dr. Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins and the ACCURATE center ruminated in his blog:

"The current certification process may have been appropriate when a 900 lb lever voting machine was deployed. The machine could be tested every which way, and if it met the criteria, it could be certified because it was not likely to change. But software is different. (Y)ou cannot certify an electronic voting machine the way you certify a lever machine.... (W)e absolutely expect that vulnerabilities will be discovered all the time...."

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Let's stop pretending that e-vote counting systems -- with or without paper trails -- are safer overall than a voting system comprised mainly of lever voting machines. There is no evidence to support such claims, especially given the way paper ballots are being used and abused -- particularly with respect to software-driven computerized optical scan "recounts" that are rapidly becoming standard practice in state after state in lieu of the even less trustworthy DREs they are replacing.

http://e-voter.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-yorks-back-door-to-ballot-box.html


See the ballot stuffing video:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x170181

[Captain Hilts]

1. We need more machines like this and voters like this...

[Wilms]

2. And more State BoE's like in NY where the voting system is the nations most secure...

...despite the activists.

:yoiks:

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Alas, that "back door" does not exist...

since the magic slot is easy to fix and the ballots are dealt with in ways you are obviously not familiar with.

But, hey! I just work with the machines-- who am I to get in the way of a good hysterical rant?

[Wilms]

4. Oh. Now it's "easy to fix".

You just said it was ALREADY fixed.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x506904#507187


So you work with these machines (not that they've been used in an election, so you may have been trained to use them) and that makes you qualified to say that these folks who report the problem don't know what they're talking about. That right?

So what's it gonna be. DHS would recommend duct tape. You?

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Duct tape works just fine if needed. Let me know when...

you actually worked on one of these. Or worked with someone who's been testing and refining them for months.

[syncinlight]

6. Duct tape really doesn't work...

unless you are just referencing to people tripping over the
power cords on the floor.  It's great for preventing
accidents.  I believe that would be the county's liability :)

[Bill Bored]

7. .