Worries Persist Over U.S. Electronic Voting
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Florida officials will not worry about hanging chads when voters make their choice in November's presidential election but they'll be on the lookout for software glitches, hackers and other less visible plagues.
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Substantial threats to the integrity of the U.S. presidential election remain despite an improvement in election practices since 2000, an international delegation of election observers reported on Thursday.
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THE three companies that certify the US&#39; voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the ATM-like machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in the presidential poll in November.
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County election officials have been among the staunchest advocates of electronic voting, insisting that computers are as reliable as paper ballots.
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MIAMI  - The bizarre disappearance of tens of thousands of ballots has fueled worries over Florida&#39;s ability to avert a repeat of the chaos of 2000, when Americans were kept guessing for 36 days who won the election.
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The 100,000 electronic voting machines in use in Tuesday's election have a big downside: Candidates who dispute the results won't have a way to conduct a meaningful recount. Analysis by Kim Zetter.
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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A bill that could come up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives this week would require that all e-voting machines used in the November 2008 U.S. elections be accompanied by a voter-verified paper ballot.
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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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BOSTON - Tens of millions of people will cast their votes Nov. 2 in one of the most hotly contested presidential elections in recent U.S. history. But voters across the U.S. will encounter different voting technologies and procedures, with many counties nationwide clinging to punchcard, lever machine and even paper ballots, and the transition to electronic voting moving slowly in many states.
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The record use of electronic voting machines on Nov. 2 led to hundreds of voting irregularities and shows the need for higher standards, a voting rights group said Thursday.
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Many voter rights' advocates are fighting to decertify electronic voting machines, arguing they're not reliable. But one bloc is behind the new equipment -- disabled voters who say the machines give them privacy.
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Many states are facing legal challenges over possible voting problems Nov. 2. A look at some of the developments Tuesday and Wednesday:
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While many voter rights' advocates are fighting to decertify electronic voting machines, arguing that they're not reliable, one bloc remains steadfast behind the new equipment - disabled voters who say the machines give them long-denied privacy.
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As officials investigated the human errors that disrupted Maryland's primary election, there were renewed fears yesterday that electronic malfunctions could cause even greater problems in November.
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Colorado's secretary of state has declared many of the state's electronic voting machines to be unreliable, but said Tuesday that some of them could still be used in November if a software patch is installed.
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The most closely monitored vote in US election history failed to iron out all the glitches, with complaints ranging from misdirected voters to malfunctioning polling machines and even slashed tires.