Ohio brings in experts to review troubled e-voting systems
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A Denver-based e-voting testing laboratory and experts from three universities have been hired by the state of Ohio to undertake independent evaluations of the states&#39; e-voting hardware, software, and processes. The move is aimed at finding and fixing potential problems before the 2008 presidential election.The work is being done under a $1.7 million contract awarded earlier this summer by the state to get an in-depth picture of how the e-voting system is working. Since the 2000 presidential election,&#160;critics of e-voting systems have voiced concerns&#160;about the accuracy, integrity, and security of e-voting results and have pushed for tougher means of ensuring that every vote cast is properly counted.Ohio has faced e-voting problems in several elections in which electronic machines were used, including a&#160;May 2006 primary election,&#160;when a host of accuracy problems were reported.The evaluation process was announced by newly elected Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner after she took office in January. Chris Nance, Ohio&#39;s assistant secretary of state, said Tuesday that the review will test a representative sample of the 40,000 e-voting machines and systems used in Ohio&#39;s 88 counties to determine what changes and improvements need to be made. &quot;This is a risk assessment&quot; being done to identify potential vulnerabilities in the related systems, Nance said.After a competitive hiring process this summer, Ohio tapped Denver-based SysTest Labs to conduct the evaluation. SysTest Labs is accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission for e-voting system certification and testing.In a first for Ohio, and perhaps the nation, three computer security researchers from three major universities -- Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Santa Barbara -- are also conducting independent evaluations of the state&#39;s e-voting systems. Those reviews will be submitted along with the ones being done by SysTest Labs.Having evaluations from various sources &quot;creates this range of feedback,&quot; said Nance.The e-voting hardware in the state is primarily from Omaha-based Election Systems &amp; Software and Allen, Texas-based Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold Election Systems. Two counties use machines from Austin-based Hart InterCivic.Brian Phillips, president of SysTest Labs, said that the testing processes began Sept. 24 and will be completed by Nov. 30. The performance testing covers hardware and election management software, as well as the polling place devices and the central counting applications that tally all the votes, he said.The company is conducting configuration management testing to ensure that the e-voting system hardware and software matches the specifications of the certified systems allowed in elections across Ohio, he said. Also being reviewed are systems that prevent any changes or updates in the hardware or software without the approval of election officials.Final reports from the reviews will be delivered Dec. 14 to Brunner&#39;s office. Those reports will then be evaluated by the governor and legislature for any action that may be needed, Nance said.&quot;It is certainly the intention... for any secretary of state... to put in place a set of policies and procedures&quot; to ensure that every vote is properly counted, Nance said. &quot;The American electorate has seen that there are issues related to electronic voting. We would not have spent $1.7 million for this study if we felt we were on a fool&#39;s errand. It is our responsibility to put together our very best effort to do that.&quot;&quot;Is this a perfect plan? Is this the perfect approach? I don&#39;t think there is anything that is a perfect plan or approach. This is our best plan.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Ohio is the state that put President Bush over the top on Tuesday. But now it appears that an e-voting glitch gave Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes in one Ohio county. There were problems elsewhere, too.
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DEFIANCE, Ohio - Elections officials knew something was wrong when they got voter registration cards for Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Michael Jordan and George Foreman.
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(InfoWorld) - Requiring print-outs as a back-up to electronic voting machines would not improve security but would increase costs of U.S. voting systems, according to a report released Tuesday. Tech-focused think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said so-called voter-verified paper trail ballots used in conjunction with e-voting machines would "prevent the use of innovative voting technology that offers voters more security, transparency, and reliability" than paper-only balloting systems. The U.S. House of Representatives has before it a bill that would require paper-trail ballots to be used with direct recording electronic voting machines. But a paper trail would create several problems, said report author Daniel Castro, an ITIF senior analyst. Paper audit trails would create an "even bigger dispute" than past elections with missing electronic votes, Castro said. "People wouldn't know which record was accurate -- the paper or the electronic record," he said. Paper-trail ballots would also increase the cost of elections, Castro said. Printers will fail on election days, and counting machines will malfunction, he said. "When you manually count it, you have problems with the human element," he added. U.S. residents trust computers to run many other "critical applications" in banking, medicine, and aviation, the report said. Supporters of paper-trail audits disputed the report's findings. "The argument that people trust computers in other places is specious -- safety-critical systems have been developed in other contexts using rigorous standards that are not applied to voting machines," said Eugene Spafford, chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM's) U.S. policy committee. ACM has not called for e-voting machines to be scrapped, but instead for the machines to go through two levels of audit, paper trails and random machine audits, said Spafford, executive director of the Purdue University Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. While the report discounts claims that e-voting machines can be hacked and elections reversed, malicious hacking isn't the only problem with e-voting machines, Spafford added. "Errors, bugs and accidents can also result in problems unless there is an independent, durable audit trail," he said. "Under several guises [the authors] trot out the canard that 'if fraud is so possible, how come it hasn't been proven yet?' This is so obviously wrong that I'm not sure it even deserves a response." Pamela Smith, president of VerifiedVoting.org, suggested readers of the report "consider the source." "This is an industry body that has come out with this screed to support the industry," Smith said. Smith disputed the report's suggestion that a "growing technophobic movement believes that no computer can be trusted for electronic voting." Several prominent computer security experts have called for paper-trail audits, she said. "The harshest critics of e-voting -- in particular paperless e-voting -- are computer technologists who are the literal opposite of technophobic," she said. "What they claim is that in order to have secure elections, they must be auditable and recountable." Instead of printouts, lawmakers should look to the next generation of e-voting machines, the report said. One such technology provides a small receipt that voters can take with them and use to check online whether their ballots have been counted. The receipt would give voters more assurance than a typical paper-trail ballot, which they cannot take with them, Castro said. But Spafford said most newer technologies are unproven, and many aren't transparent to typical voters. "It is important that the mechanism is understandable and trusted by the population as well as correct and auditable by experts," he said. "Systems based on ... cryptographic methods are not understandable to the lay person -- and especially not to technophobic ones. Paper is well understood."
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As the November presidential election nears, several groups are mobilizing to monitor the voting process -- including a group of observers from across the globe and over a thousand techies who will help evaluate voting machines. By Laila Weir.
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Congress' investigative agency, responding to complaints from around the country, has begun to look into the Nov. 2 vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.
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From malfunctioning machines to poorly trained poll workers, Ohio has become this year's example for electoral flaws.
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Ohio&#39;s devoutly Republican secretary of state has finally certified the vote in favor of President Bush, but activists are seeking a statewide recount and demanding he explain voting irregularities to Congress.
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Experts say that when it comes to voting machines, usability issues should be as much of a concern as security.
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With the presidential election less than six weeks away, activists and security experts are ratcheting up concern over the use of touch-screen machines to cast votes.
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Six U.S. states participating in Super Tuesday primary elections are at high risk for voting-machine malfunction or tampering because they don&#39;t have paper backups, according to a report released by the Verified Voting Foundation and Common Cause.Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton University, added visuals to the report&#39;s findings when he published a picture on his blog showing him standing next to unattended e-voting machines in New Jersey Sunday evening. The picture, and a second photo from Monday evening of unattended e-voting machines, was a repeat performance for Felten, who also published a picture of unattended machines during the 2006 election.&quot;It&#39;s well known that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering if an attacker can get physical access to a machine before the election,&quot; Felten, an e-voting critic, wrote on his blog Tuesday. &quot;Most of the vendors, and a few election officials, claim that this isn&#39;t a problem because the machines are well guarded so that no would-be attacker can get to them. Which would be mildly reassuring -- if it were true.&quot;New Jersey was one of the states most at risk with the others being New York, Tennessee, Georgia, Delaware, and Arkansas, said the Common Cause/Verified Voting Foundation report. All of those states, except New York, use electronic voting machines without paper ballots in all or part of the state. New York has passed a paper record law but has not yet replaced lever machines used across most of the state, the groups said. Lever machines can malfunction and are subject to tampering, the groups said.But e-voting advocates said the Common Cause/Verified Voting Foundation report exaggerates potential problems with electronic voting machines.&quot;In the history of the United States, there has never been a case of tampering with electronic voting equipment in an actual live election environment with all of the associated procedures and election personnel, either with voter verifiable paper trails or without,&quot; said Michelle Shafer, vice president of communications and external affairs at e-voting machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems. &quot;Election administration is about the people, procedures and the technology, not just the technology itself.&quot;In many cases, states maintain individual electronic files of all votes cast, added David Beirne, executive director of trade group, the Election Technology Council. Many states also require logic and accuracy testing both before and after an election, and many e-voting machines have redundant memory mechanisms, he added.&quot;No voting system represents a high risk for the states that are using them,&quot; he said. &quot;The main objection from Verified Voting ... is that the voter is not verifying a paper document in addition to the electronic record. The voter does verify the electronic record, and the election can be verified for its integrity through the use of the appropriate security procedures by local election officials.&quot;The report &quot;reflects a series of perceptions which are not grounded in fact,&quot; Beirne added.But the high-risk states have no choice but to trust the information that the electronic machines spit out, said Pamela Smith, president of the Verified Voting Foundation. &quot;The vote is what it is, or what the machine says it is,&quot; she said. &quot;There&#39;s no way to do a recount.&quot;In addition, another five states -- Alabama, Arizona, Massachusetts, Utah, and Oklahoma -- use paper ballots along with their e-voting machines, but don&#39;t require regular audits to check the electronic results, the groups said. Four states with primaries on Tuesday use voting machines but also require regular audits, and were listed as low-risk in the report. Those states were California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Missouri.Twenty-four states hold presidential primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, but just 15 of them use electronic voting machines.
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The Democratic Party said Monday it will examine reports of voting problems in Ohio, where President Bush's victory clinched his re-election.
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With primary contests or caucuses in 24 states today, election officials from three states explain how e-voting systems are readied for voters.
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The GAO report released earlier this month makes no bones about it: Security and reliability concerns about electronic voting are real and demand attention from federal, state and local authorities. So where, asks Brad Friedman, is the outrage?
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COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 17 -- Ohio  has hired a computer security expert to determine the likelihood of someone getting access to the data on a stolen backup storage device, Gov. Ted Strickland said Sunday.
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Ohio's e-voting systems are unreliable and insecure and should be changed, according to a new report done at the request of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.
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Almost 4,000 votes got added to Bush's Ohio count. Reports of minor glitches continue to turn up.