American Idol, Hawaii, and Internet-based Voting

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While many of us are working to save the integrity of our election system by defeating New York's move to software-based vote counting, Hawaii and the NYC Department of Education have moved in the other direction -- internet-based voting. James Pinkerton has written an interesting commentary on the politics of vote counting, anticipating what he thinks is an inevitable move to the internet.

I include some excerpts from his piece. His questions and comments are as relevant to software-based vote-counting machines as the internet, but his solution seems as flawed as the current "certification" process.

JAMES P. PINKERTON: Will Democrats Become a Permanent Majority Thanks to Internet Voting? � FOX Forum � FOXNews.com: "So if vote fraud is already a problem, what will happen when the “vote” is simply an electronic pulse, that could have come, potentially, from anywhere in the US–or around the world? Who will oversee the e-voting process? And who will oversee the overseers?"

...But of course, the high-tech nature of digital democracy adds a new layer of complexity, as well as mystery, to the voting process. In theory, the technology is completely neutral. But theoretical technology and practical politics are two different things. Diebold, a leading manufacturer of traditional voting machines, has come under repeated fire for alleged pro-Republican bias. But the complexity of a voting machine is nothing compared to the complexity of computers and the Internet.

...So what’s needed immediately is a completely fair and transparent process to examine all facets of the transition to Internet voting. And the only way to achieve that fairness and transparency is to create a rigorously bipartisan outfit to oversee the implementation of such technology, modeled after either the Federal Election Commission, or the private Commission on Presidential Debates.

Voter fraud has always been a problem, and always will be. The integrity of our election system is based on the voters' belief that the system is impartial, observable, and secure.

A bipartisan commission of Washington lackeys sitting in a hearing room can never assure voters that a software based system -- local or internet driven -- is secure or impartial, never-mind observable. I cite the recent American Idol vote as a silly, but relevant example.

My Google Alerts for voting news were full of articles this week about the groundswell of fans who believe that AT&T manipulated the American Idol vote and that's why their favorite lost.

Just try to convince them they're wrong.

Rewards for hacking electronic voting machines? Great idea!

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Phillipine's Senator Alan Peter Cayetano's proposal to reward anyone who can hack an electronic voting machine may not be as outlandish as Manila Standard Today columnist Fel Maragay thinks.

The Phillipines, like New York State, passed a law mandating automated election machines. As in New York State, their law includes criteria the machines must meet -- 18 specifications in the Phillipines; Federal certification in NY. But Senator Cayetano knows what so many don't want to admit -- those specifications don't make voting machines secure. And he aims to prove it. [Emphasis mine]:

Philippine News -- Manila Standard Today -- Fears over poll automation -- may4_2009: "The automation law, according to its principal author, Senator Richard Gordon, requires the contractor of the automation project to comply with at least 18 specifications to ensure the 100-percent accuracy and efficiency and to ensure that the process is free from hacking and manipulation. But so extreme is the apprehension of the doubting Thomases over the threat of hacking that it has reached paranoiac proportion. This prompted Senator Alan Peter Cayetano to come out with an outlandish proposal to allocate P100 million out of the automation budget as a reward to anyone who can successfully hack the voting machines, supposedly to put in place the necessary counter-measures."

If the NY legislature believes software-based voting is secure, let them offer a substantial reward for anyone who can hack it. They have nothing to lose. And, if they believe the experts -- that all software-based systems are vulnerable to hacking -- then they should rescind ERMA, letting us keep the lever system that has worked with so few problems for so many years.

Outlandish or reasonable. What do you think?

Why computers are bad at counting votes

Click the box … voters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during last
November’s presidential election hope their ballots won’t be ‘erased’.
Photograph: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Wendy Grossman had an excellent article in the London Guardian which I found in tomorrow's Taipei Times. Hmm, the world is getting smaller. Anyway, Grossman does a great job pulling together some of the recent problems with electronic voting.

Guardian "It’s commonly said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Yet this is what we keep doing with electronic voting machines — find flaws and try again. It should therefore have been no surprise when, at the end of March, California’s secretary of state’s office of voting system technology assessment decertified older voting systems from Diebold’s Premier Election Solutions division. The reason: a security flaw that erased 197 votes in the Humboldt county precinct in last November’s presidential election.

Clearly, 197 votes would not have changed the national result. But the loss, which exceeds the error rate allowed under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, was only spotted because a local citizen group, the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project (humtp.com) monitored the vote using a ballot-imaging scanner to create an independent record. How many votes were lost elsewhere?"

She quotes Rebecca Mercuri, a security consultant who studied voting systems for her doctoral dissertation:

“It’s nothing new. These are all security flaws that are well known in the industry. Why are they acting as if this is the first time they’ve heard this?” The audit log problems were documented in Bev Harris’s 2004 book, Black Box Voting (blackboxvoting.org).

Mercuri explains that election software belongs to the class of problems known as “NP-complete,” that is, problems computers cannot solve in a known amount of time. How much time have you got to test that a given voting system will function perfectly under all possible circumstances?

“What are people going to do about it?” she asks. “Say we fixed it when it’s theoretically not possible to fix these things at any real level?”

And she points out that many of the security problems now involve insiders with legitimate access to the software, bought off by organized crime gangs because of the money they can make. They only need a USB stick in their back pocket.

Grossman continues:

At least with voting, citizen groups are motivated to push for greater transparency. In the UK, Jason Kitcat, Green councilor for Brighton and Hove, on the south coast of England, organized volunteers to observe e-voting trials in the 2007 local government elections in England and Scotland on behalf of the Open Rights Group.

“We saw the same audit log issues,” he says. “We know from a computer science point of view that making an audit log that can’t be changed is impossible. But it seems as if there’s a huge disconnect between people who are computer-science literate, and the people delivering the policy.” [my emphasis]

Besides, politicians like making uncontroversial decisions. Who could fault them for trusting a company that makes ATMs worldwide? Again, it comes back to humans.

“The folks who buy ATMs [bank managers] and voting machines [election officials] don’t really want to pay for a facility that will make it easier for people to challenge them,” says Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, England.

“In the long run, of course, this ends up costing them more: fraud can lead to challenges that are systemic rather than local. Nevertheless, the purchasers may be rational. Most of the bank managers who bought crap ATM systems in the ’80s are retired now — they got away with it. With voting machines, some vendors have been discredited in some countries, but lots of money has still been made.”

That is, from us — the taxpayer and the bank customer. Kitcat says: “It is shocking that in this day and age this has been allowed to continue.”

This is a good overview of the issues today. NY has been the last holdout. Let's not let it happen here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why machines are bad at counting votes (guardian.co.uk)
• Diebold Admits Flaw In Voting Software (politics.slashdot.org)
• Diebold Admits Audit Logs in ALL Versions of Their Software Fail to Record Ballot Deletions (bradblog.com)
• Diebold Voting System Has 'Delete' Button for Erasing Audit Logs (wired.com)
• Turns Out Diebold's ATMs Insecure As Well; Scammers Install Malware (techdirt.com)
• Premier Election Systems' electronic voting machines have an erase button! (allthingsreform.org)
• No Surprise Here: Lost Votes In Last Election Due To Faulty Diebold Equipment (techdirt.com)

Most electronic voting systems can be hacked, CIA expert says

Now, just why is it that we're arguing about keeping our levers?

This is a story not to be missed! A CIA expert testifying before the US Election Assistance Commission...

The Raw Story | Most electronic voting systems can be hacked, CIA expert says: "'Computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results,' a summary of his remarks said.

Moreover, Stigall said that the CIA believes Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may have fixed a recent recount in his favor using such tactics. Chavez, he said, controlled most of the voting machines used and may have provided the program that was used to 'randomly' select machines for audit during a recount.

The voting machines Venezuela used were made by Smartmatic, a company that partnered with Chavez's government which was owned by US-based Sequoia systems until 2007. Sequoia also provides voting machines for the District of Columbia and 16 US states."

I hope you'll click the link and read the whole story. It makes the notion of op-scanners and paper ballots seem pretty silly.

And, here's the link to the Election Assistance Commissions transcript.

Related articles by Zemanta

• CIA Expert Decries E-Voting Security (tech.slashdot.org)
• CIA Warning: 'E-Voting Not Secure' - U.S. EAC Finally Releases Complete Transcript of Stunning Cybersecurity Expert Testimony (bradblog.com)
• US Election Assistance Commission very selective in reporting of CIA analysis of electronic voting machines (allthingsreform.org)

Why Fight to Keep Our NYS Lever Voting System?

Our lever system works

The lever machines and election procedures that constitute our New York State lever voting system provide us with the only system that can meet our constitutionally- guaranteed right to a reliable and transparent election process. In the 1880s and 1890s, paper ballots were at the core of NY’s history of rampant voter fraud. This fraud stimulated our state’s commitment to finding a system that minimized the risk of tampering. By 1925, the entire state used lever voting, except New York City, where Tammany Hall fought levers to the bitter end. The 1926 election results reassured Democrats and Republicans in NYC that lever voting machines meant clean elections. Since then, and precisely because lever machines are mechanical, the NY election system, equipment, and accompanying procedures, have evolved to the point where New Yorkers have great confidence in and affection for our lever system.

Ballot marking devices make the lever system HAVA compliant

The claim that retaining our lever machines keeps NY out of compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is erroneous. The Federal Court accepted the State’s plan to comply with HAVA by installing ballot-marking devices for people with disabilities in every polling place. That plan was implemented in 2008.

Why spend this money now?

In this time of economic crisis, New York taxpayers should be spared the excessive and recurring costs imposed by a switch to an optical scan voting system. Let’s decrease, not increase, costs.

An electronic system requires funding for equipment purchase, initial and on-going staff training, and recurring costs for climate-controlled warehousing, sophisticated system maintenance, software verification, and technicians on call. Certification requirements will change over time; the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is presently debating new standards, imposing additional costs to recertify previously purchased scanners and replace those that can’t meet the new standards. All of this would cost New Yorkers millions of additional dollars, even in small counties.

Why spend these millions when our current lever system has proven reliable and tamper-proof over many decades, and maintainable at very low cost? In 2006, our state legislators passed the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA) which requires that the Election Commission use certified, software-based voting machines – far beyond what HAVA requires. Reversing the electronic voting requirement is a budget cut we could all get behind.

The technology proposed to replace levers doesn’t secure the vote

Some believe that “certification” means secure, tamper-proof, or not hackable. It doesn’t; nothing in NY’s standards or the EAC (2005) standards currently in effect guarantees it, nor does anyone claim that it does. Computer scientists currently agree that, today, threats to the security of touch-screen and optical scanner software continue without foreseeable solutions. Maybe someday a system to handle these threats will emerge, but currently software, by its nature, can be tested today and hacked tomorrow; verified now and changed minutes later, without a trace.

Many believe that the law includes a solution to the software security issue -- voter-verified paper records for audit purposes. However, three issues remain unresolved: determining 1) a statistically valid sample size and methodology for audit; 2) a process for resolving discrepancies; and 3) a chain of custody procedure for the paper ballots.

Statisticians warn that ERMA's 3% sample is inadequate to ferret out fraud and no methodology for selecting the sample ballots or resolving discrepancies exists. Historically, most vote tampering occurred during the transport of paper ballots from the polling place for counting or recounting elsewhere. Paper ballots must be counted in plain view before they leave the polling place, or strict chain of custody procedures must be in place. NY State’s present law calls for neither.

Here’s what you can do

• Sign the petition
  
• Contact your elected representatives at all levels of government to let them know where you stand on this issue; ask them to follow the lead of Dutchess, Columbia, and Ulster Counties and the NY Association of Towns by passing a resolution urging the State to keep the lever system.
• Write a letter to the editor; ask why they aren’t paying attention to this issue
• Share this information with your friends; get the buzz going