Tag: voting machines

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Dangers of Electronic Voting

One of the most significant threats to the integrity of the 2020 election can be wholly avoided.

In July, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence stressed that there was an immediate need to secure America’s voting systems. Its key recommendations were that states replace outdated and vulnerable voting systems with a voter-verified paper trail and use statistically sound audits.  

In August, the Brennan Center reported that:

“The lifespan of electronic voting machines can vary, but experts agree that systems over a decade old are more likely to need to be replaced for security and reliability reasons. We estimate that in November 2018, 34 percent of all local election jurisdictions were using voting machines that were at least 10 years old as their primary polling place equipment (or as their primary tabulation equipment in all vote-by-mail jurisdictions). This number includes counties and towns in 41 states…11 states use paperless machines as their primary polling place equipment in at least some counties and towns… As both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and National Academy of Sciences have noted, we should replace antiquated equipment, and paperless equipment in particular, as soon as possible.”

There is a salient question. American democracy did quite well before the advent of electronic voting machines.  Why was there a sudden rush to “fix” a system that wasn’t broken, indeed, was actually the envy of every free nation on Earth?

Steve Levy, writing for Fox News, offers one explanation why states rushed to electronic voting.  “A cottage industry of electronic voting machine manufacturers swooped in on every state capitol, with ample campaign contributions in tow. Before you knew it, it wasn’t a question of whether states would purchase these machines, but which bells-and-whistles version they would choose… Why would we jeopardize the integrity of our electoral process for no valid reason? Electronic machines were not enough for the tech set. Online voting would revolutionize the franchise, they said. Amazingly, 32 states to this day permit some form of online balloting, despite warnings the systems are not secure. An analysis by Silicon Valley executives warned that “potential criminal electronic attacks on computer software, such as destructive ‘viruses’ or ‘Trojan Horse’ software, create a serious threat to Internet voting.” In 2004, the Pentagon canceled a proposed Internet voting program for overseas military personnel due concerns about hacking. And in 2010, a University of Michigan professor answered a challenge made by the Board of Elections in Washington​, D.C., which was testing a new Internet voting device in a mock election. The professor hacked it within 36 hours.”

In a study, Election Defsense.org  explained that “The use of computers prevents observation and makes elections vulnerable to fraud in new and profound ways compared to older technologies… When technicians handle systems for non-technical staff, this opens the door to fraud… E[electronic] vote systems are easily corrupted.

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“Computerized elections are a political problem. The Resolution on Electronic Voting, endorsed by thousands of computer technologists, says ‘Computerized voting equipment is inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering.’ Every study of electronic voting has said that systems from the major vendors are insecure and of poor quality.

“In spite of all this, few government officials with responsibility for elections are heeding the constant stream of warnings about electronic voting, and the expressed distrust of voters. The major media and many officials are still urging us to convert to electronic voting. In 2004 Americans witnessed an overwhelming incidence of dirty tricks and failures of our election infrastructure, and the use of unverifiable and unverified computers is part of this failure.”

A Stanford University examination of the problem provides information that concurs with Election Defense.

“Opponents [of electronic voting] do not feel that the voting basics can be maintained in an electronic voting system. The arguments have been divided into 3 general categories of complaints: issues with the technology, vast possibilities of fraud, and protection of voters and their votes.

“As Bruce Schneier describes it, technology adds more steps to the process and thus increases the possibility of error with each additional step, all of which are largely unseen by the voter. Put Murphy’s Law of ‘whatever can go wrong, will go wrong’ into play, and one can surmise that technology will most likely falter. Not only does the technology create more errors in the electronic workings, but the voters can also commit mistakes due to confusion with the user interface. The terminology is confusing, different machines produce different interfaces, and even the audio guides to help the disabled may prove more confusing than helpful. With the advent of electronic machine voting also comes the higher possibilities of fraudulent machines and practices.”

Election Defense Suggests returning to lever machines with paper backups, paper ballots and precinct-count optical scanners.

Photo: A voting machine (Wikipedia)

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Absence of Paper Ballots Jeopardizes Confidence

The alteration of U.S. voting machines from the familiar paper and mechanical devices to computer-based systems has raised numerous concerns, including the potential of tampering.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine states that elections should be conducted using human-readable paper ballots, no later than the 2020 presidential election, and that efforts should be made to do that in the upcoming 2018 midterm ballot. The Report also  emphasizes that “Ballots that have been marked by voters should not be returned over the Internet or any network connected to it, because no current technology can guarantee their secrecy, security, and verifiability.”

It’s not just the actual voting that not be entrusted to solely computerized processes, according to the National Academies. “State and local governments must work together with the federal government to secure and improve election systems…The cybersecurity of electronic systems used in elections, such as voter registration databases and vote tabulation systems, should be continuously monitored and improved. And audits of paper ballots should be used to verify that votes have been tabulated correctly and to detect when electronic systems have been compromised.”

The Reports key recommendations include:

  1. Elections should be conducted with human-readable paper ballots.
  2. States should mandate a specific type of audit known as a “risk-limiting” audit prior to the certification of election results. By examining a statistically appropriate random sample of paper ballots, risk-limiting audits can determine with a high level of confidence whether a reported election outcome reflects a correct tabulation of the votes cast.
  3. Internet voting should not be used at the present time, and it should not be used in the future until and unless very robust guarantees of secrecy, security, and verifiability are developed and in place. 

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  4. Election administrators should routinely assess the integrity of voter registration databases and put in place systems that detect efforts to probe, tamper with, or interfere with voter registration systems.
  5. Jurisdictions that use electronic pollbooks should have backup plans in place to provide access to current voter registration lists in the event of any disruption.
  6. Election systems should continue to be considered as U.S. Department of Homeland Security-designated critical infrastructure.

The analysis by the National Academies is not the first to question the safety of balloting that excludes paper. A 2017 Atlantic  report noted that technologist Barbara Simons warned that the electronic systems that had gained favor in the United States after the 2000 presidential election were shoddy, and eminently hackable.

“Though a liberal who had first examined voting systems under the Clinton administration, she did battle with the League of Women Voters (of which she is a member), the ACLU, and other progressive organizations that had endorsed paperless voting, largely on the grounds that electronic systems offered greater access to voters with disabilities…In late July [2017], at the annual Def Con hacker conference, in Las Vegas, she addressed an event called the Voting Village—a staged attack on voting machines. “I lose sleep over this. I hope you will too,” she told the hackers who had packed into a windowless conference room at Caesars Palace.Four voting machines had been secured for the event, three of them types still in use. One team of hackers used radio signals to eavesdrop on a machine as it recorded votes. Another found a master password online. Within hours of getting their hands on the machines, the hackers had discovered vulnerabilities in all four.”

Reuters  reports that federal election officials are concerned that voting machines that do not provide a paper backup in 14 of the 40 most competitive races “could undermine confidence” in election results, including “… races in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Kansas and Kentucky. Nationwide, of 435 congressional seats up for grabs, 144 are in districts where some or all voters will not have access to machines using paper records…”

Illustration: Pixabay

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Should America Return to Paper Ballots? Part 2

The New York Analysis concludes its study of electronic ballots vs. paper voting.

A study in the Atlantic by Dan Gilmor notes that “Accountability is a crapshoot. In some jurisdictions, voters use machines that create electronic tallies with no ‘paper trail’—that is, no tangible evidence whatsoever that the voter’s choices were honored. A “recount” in such places means asking the machine whether it was right the first time… For reasons that remain unclear, Congress has been largely uninterested in doing what’s needed to make voting safe, secure, and verifiable (perhaps because the existing system is how members got elected)…Barring a national commitment to getting this right, maybe the answer is to change direction entirely. Maybe we should abandon electronic voting systems and do everything on paper, and count by hand. We’d wait longer for results, a lot longer. If it ensured accurate results, though, I’d call that a reasonable trade.

Fox News  reports that Georgia is looking to return to paper ballots. “The most secure elections in the world are conducted with a piece of paper and a pencil,” said Georgia State Rep. Scot Turner. “It allows you to continue into the future to verify the result.”  Turner has proposed a bill that would retire Georgia’s electronic touch-screen voting machines and switch to paper ballots that voters would fill out and then be counted by optical scan machines. The technology has been in use for decades to score standardized tests for grade-school students.”

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The National Association of Secretaries of State  notes that “Just as we must have contingency plans for floods and all kinds of natural phenomena, we must also be ready to deal with man-made threats. The risks posed by foreign government hackers, cyber criminals and everyday hacktivists are not new to election officials. States and localities are committed to working with national security agencies and other federal partners, including the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to solicit input on threats and risk mitigation in our elections. States are already deploying numerous resources for this election cycle, including extensive testing for cyber threats described by the recent FBI alert, and best practices guidelines produced by the EAC. Additional steps may be taken based upon credible or specific threats that are identified in the run-up to Election Day. Secretaries of State are also part of a DHS Election Infrastructure Cybersecurity Working Group, created for sharing resources, best practices and technical advice. To be clear: The equipment that people vote on is NOT connected to the Internet. Vote counting is NEVER done with systems connected to the Internet, and tabulation systems are not networked. Election systems must be physically secured when not in use, with public accuracy and performance testing that anyone can observe. Post-election audits can help to further guard against deliberate manipulation of the election, as well as unintentional software, hardware or programming issues. Again, there are no documented cases of flawed voting results linked to alleged cyber hacking.”

Of course, there have been calls in some states to allow voting via internet, despite the NASS statement.

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Should America Return to Paper Ballots?

Accurate voting is vital to the American system of government, and an area of bipartisan concern. Yet, according to some critics, a potential threat to the security of balloting has been voluntarily adopted, and there are now calls for a reversal of that process.

The replacement of simple lever machines and even more basic paper ballots has swept across the nation, particularly since 2010. A Stanford study examined the merits of electronic voting: “One of the significant benefits of this new system is the possibility for increased efficiency.  With Electronic Voting Machines voters can submit their votes, and be reasonably confident that their vote will count (namely avoiding the “hanging chad” problem that handicapped the 2000 presidential elections in the United States).  New Electronic Voting Machines can also stop voters from common election faults, such as picking too many or no candidates, also thereby increasing the general effectiveness of voting… technology adds more steps to the process and thus increases the possibility of error with each additional step, all of which are largely unseen by the voter.

“Not only does the technology create more errors in the electronic workings, but the voters can also commit mistakes due to confusion with the user interface. The terminology is confusing, different machines produce different interfaces, and even the audio guides to help the disabled may prove more confusing than helpful.

“With the advent of electronic machine voting also comes the higher possibilities of fraudulent machines and practices. First of all, the technology is ‘black box software,’ meaning that the public is not allowed access into the software that controls the voting machines. Although companies protect their software to protect against fraud (and to beat back competition), this also leaves the public with no idea of how the voting software works. It would be simple for the company to manipulate the software to produce fraudulent results. Also, the vendors who market the machines are in competition with each other, and there is no guarantee that they are producing the machines in the best interest of the voters and the accuracy of the ballots.

“Lastly, vote accuracy is also an issue, because voters have no way of confirming there vote, and there is also no way of conducting a recount with direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting. With DRE, there is no paper trail, no verification, and thus no scrutiny of the processes. Voter anonymity is also a problem. Voters have to provide much of their personal information to the systems for voter verification, and with that comes the problem of keeping voter information safe and keeping voters anonymous.”
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The attraction of electronic devises has been explained by Jesse Emspsak, writing in Live Science:  “With all the vulnerabilities of machines, why not simply use paper ballots, and hand-count them, as some smaller districts do, or even some major democracies…The answer comes down to U.S. election structure, [according to Warren Stewart, communications director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that tracks voting technologies.] Americans vote on several candidates in each state, and in California and some other states, voters also weigh in on ballot measures…Of course, one could go to paper-based systems and hand-counting, but it would take a lot longer to count the votes. That might not be a bad thing, Stewart said.

But significant unease about the potential for tampering, either by partisan interests within the nation or by hostile nations abroad, exists.

Bruce Schneier  a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School who serves on the advisory board of Verified Voting, recently noted in a Guardian editorial: “Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale; the best way to do that is to back up as much of the system as possible with paper. Last year, the Defcon hackers’ conference sponsored a Voting Village. Organizers collected 25 pieces of voting equipment, including voting machines and electronic poll books. By the end of the weekend, conference attendees had found ways to compromise every piece of test equipment: to load malicious software, compromise vote tallies and audit logs, or cause equipment to fail. It’s important to understand that these were not well-funded nation-state attackers. These were not even academics who had been studying the problem for weeks. These were bored hackers, with no experience with voting machines, playing around between parties one weekend.”

The Report Concludes Tomorrow.

Illustration by Pixabay