Florida e-vote audit criticized by Jennings, activists
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Christing Jennings and e-voting activists strongly criticized an audit that found an 18,000 undervote in Flodida's 13th district Congressional election was not caused by defective voting machines or e-coting processes.
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Although Florida election officials are chastized for being lax in monitoring the company that built a lousy database for tracking felons and dead voters, an internal audit concludes that there was no intent to disenfranchise anyone.
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More weaknesses appear in the Diebold electronic voting system that activists say could be used to rig the November election. The company says auditing procedures would catch any vote fraud. By Kim Zetter.
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U.S. Postal Service investigators on Wednesday were trying to find thousands of absentee ballots that should have been delivered to voters in one of Florida's most populous counties, officials said.
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Edward Bitet fought in World War II, built affordable housing for veterans and taught sixth grade. When the Long Island native retired to Florida, he fulfilled another civic duty by becoming a poll worker. But Bitet, 77, isn't volunteering this year &#151; he says he doesn't trust Palm Beach County's electronic voting machines. He walked out of a county demonstration of touch-screen terminals convinced that software bugs could wreak havoc on Nov. 2.
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Elections experts today questioned the reliability and security of e-voting systems during a congressional committee hearing.
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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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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - The county election supervisor whose confusing ballot design contributed to the turmoil of the 2000 presidential election became the butt of late-night talk show jokes and the target of death threats...
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Florida election officials on Monday declared Republican Vern Buchanan as the winner of the race in the stateÃ¢ÂÂs southwestern 13th District. But Democratic nominee Christine Jennings is formally challenging the results, arguing that voting machine errors in one county account for BuchananÃ¢ÂÂs apparent lead.
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As the primary season continues, observers of the electronic-voting scene ask whether it's possible to tally the ballots efficiently while restoring Americans' faith in the process. Random, mandatory audits of cast ballots show promise, but even after demonstrated successes, not everyone's on board.
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A House committee chairman and an election official on Thursday punched holes in the notion that paper records will solve the problems with new electronic voting machines.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. government board looking for ways to improve the security of electronic voting machines has taken the first step toward requiring the machines to have independent audit mechanisms, a day after it rejected a different audit proposal. The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), an advisory board to the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution calling on its Security and Transparency Subcommittee to draft requirements for independently verifiable voting records, such as voter-verified paper trail printouts, to be used with direct record electronic (DRE) machines. The new proposal, offered by TGDC member Ronald Rivest, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls on the subcommittee to write requirements for the next generation of e-voting machines that make them "software independent" -- to include an audit mechanism independent of the software inside the machines. Rivest said he was happy the second proposal passed, even though the first failed. "I think it's very important for the safety of voting machines in this country," he said of the TGDC's vote. The Association for Computing Machinery's Public Policy Committee, critics of e-voting, praised the TGDC's Tuesday vote. "We have long held the position that there needs to be a means of verification that voters recognize as the vote they cast," the group said in a statement. "The committee ... rightly acknowledges that further research in this field is needed to provide innovative solutions to the e-voting challenges remaining." Critics of e-voting machines have called for paper-trail audits as a way for voters to ensure their votes are tallied correctly. In a November report, staff at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology advocated that the U.S. government require e-voting machines to include independent audit mechanisms, saying DREs without audit mechanisms "cannot be made secure or highly reliable." But during the TGDC meeting, H. Stephen Berger, chairman of the voting systems standards committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), questioned how other industries could create software that has few errors, such as software on electronic equipment used on airplanes. The software on a typical DRE is less than a megabyte, and e-voting vendors should be able to find a way to make it secure and error-free without adding paper trail audits, he said during debate Tuesday. "I have to believe we can verify and put very careful controls on that, so that we can get an accurate and verified record of what the voter does in the booth," Berger said. But Internet browsers have less code than the typical DRE and still have "tons of problems" with security, said Daniel Schutzer, executive director of the Financial Services Technology Consortium. "If money were no object, if time were no object," e-voting machine vendors could create software that was free of bugs and could be tested and verified, Schutzer added. "Considering what we're working with ... that's still a pipe dream." Monday's failed proposal, also offered by Rivest, called on the U.S. government to develop e-voting machine guidelines only for machines that included independent audit capabilities. It would be "unwise" to allow the use of DREs that do not include independent audits, it said. Tuesday's proposal, which passed unanimously, took a slightly less restrictive approach. It called for future DREs to include audit mechanisms, and it said TGDC should "ensure that systems that produce independently verifiable voting records are reliable and provide adequate support for audits." But the proposal that passed stopped short of requiring the current generation of e-voting machines to add on audit mechanisms. "Election officials and vendors have appropriately responded to the growing complexity of voting systems by adding more stringent access controls, encryption, testing, and physical security to election procedures and systems," the proposal said. The new proposal addressed some TGDC concerns about accessibility for disabled people and what to do with existing e-voting machines, Rivest said by phone. "It's not a motion to encourage people to dump their machines in any way," he said. The Election Assistance Commission will hear a report about the TGDC action at a meeting Thursday, but the new audit standards likely wouldn't go into effect until after 2010.
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Once again, Florida is embroiled in a dispute over vote counting in the presidential election.
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A state rule barring Florida counties with touch-screen voting from conducting manual recounts is at odds with state law, according to an administrative law judge ruling in a lawsuit against the state.
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As proposed legislation adding safeguards to electronic voting languishes, criticism of the bill is mounting among legislators and experts.
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Opponents of a measure to add slot machines at south Florida race tracks are demanding a recount in Broward County, insisting there is something strange about a batch of 78,000 absentee votes that helped tip the scales for the proposal.
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Cheryl Roberts was impressed with Florida's new voting machines in the 2002 primary, when she cast an electronic ballot for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill McBride. But a series of computer glitches &#151; including startling cases of corrupted or missing data &#151; has undermined her faith. So for Tuesday's primary in Florida, Roberts is turning to an absentee ballot so Broward County has a paper record of her vote.