E-Voting Research Delayed, Experts Say
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After nearly 50,000 Michigan Democrats cast ballots over the Internet in February, academics eagerly sought election data that would help them determine what types of people voted online. But scholars around the country complain that they haven't been able to get statistics from the Feb. 7 caucus.
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Researcher who found vulnerabilities in California's e-voting systems looks ahead to better auditing.
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Touted as the solution to the hanging chads of the 2000 presidential election, experts debate the reliability of software that operates the new electronic voting systems. -The Washington Post
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Americans abroad, whose votes could be crucial if the Nov. 2 presidential election proves close, are being denied access to a U.S. Department of Defense Web site designed to make it easier for them to cast absentee ballots.
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Election Day is less than two weeks away, but so far technology has yet to make more than the occasional cameo appearance on either presidential candidate's priority list. That's not proving to be good news for tech executives. -washingtonpost.com
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(InfoWorld) - The U.K.'s trial of e-voting and e-counting technologies during last month's local elections resulted in crashed computers and technicians scratching their heads while posing new concerns about the systems' security and reliability, a new report has concluded. In one area of England, a manual recount performed after e-counting equipment was abandoned because of delays turned up a raft of uncounted votes, said Jason Kitcat, e-voting coordinator for the Open Rights Group, which deployed observers to polling sites in England and Scotland. The group, which has been critical of e-voting and e-counting, has submitted its 64-page report to the U.K. Electoral Commission, which will publish its own report on the trials on Aug. 3. The Department for Constitutional Affairs, which oversaw the pilot programs, said it welcomed the role of observers but would reserve comment until the Electoral Commission publishes its report. The Electoral Commission also did not comment. The U.K., which embarked on a voting modernization program in 2000, held trials in 13 administrative areas in England. Scotland replaced manual counting with e-counting technologies for the first time. The government has backed e-voting technologies, including postal voting and Internet voting, to increase voter participation. Open Rights Group volunteers watched how polling stations conducted e-voting, but much of the process was opaque due to the nature of how e-voting machines work, Kitcat said. The majority of polling stations experienced technical problems, ranging from laptop problems to unreliable electronic registers, the report said. Employees of vendors whose equipment was deployed refused to interact with observers, Kitcat said. "No one would really say what was going on," Kitcat said. "It was all so mysterious." However, observers did identify potential security problems. The report includes photographs of PC workstations and hubs with open ports, a possible security risk. "Network hubs were left on the floor with power and network connections loose," the report said. "In one case in Edinburgh, a hub was observed in easy reach of attendees, with ports free lying beneath a table providing an opportunity for unauthorized access to the e-counting system's network." E-counting scanners proved finicky due to incorrect paper sizes, scanner sensitivity and trouble in handling low-quality perforations on ballots. The most curious error in e-counting occurred in a ward in Breckland, England, where voters were give two ballots: one each for district council and parish elections. Officials tried an electronic count, but came up with far fewer district ballots than parish ballots when the two counts should be roughly the same, Kitcat said. A manual recount turned up about 56 percent more district council ballots. "We haven't been given an explanation by the election official or suppliers," Kitcat said. In Scotland, observers noted that election officials could log into the e-counting software merely by scanning a bar code on their identification badges, which the Open Rights Group cited as another security concern. Some election officials were positive about using new election technologies, but "the lack of general technical understanding and knowledge about the e-counting and e-voting systems across election staff was perturbing," the report said. Â
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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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Experts say that when it comes to voting machines, usability issues should be as much of a concern as security.
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Federal agencies have delayed a range of proposed regulations from food safety to corporate governance until after Election Day.
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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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The Internet and the voting process are developing a manifold relationship. In February, US voting will actually move to the Web with the Democratic Party's first ever online global primary.
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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 - including startling cases of corrupted or missing data - has undermined her faith...
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For technology experts concerned about how electronic voting systems will perform on election day, what better tools to use to monitor the situation than those of their trade: the Web and open source development.
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Voters living abroad face an unwieldy system of absentee balloting that could prevent their votes from being counted.
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The consortium of news organizations that runs the election exit polls has voted to delay distribution of data for several hours on future election days.
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Experts say the voting group phenomenon may be a myth.
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Poor software design, serious IT management inefficiencies and an untested deployment of a critical application were all major factors in last month&#8217;s Election Day problems in Denver, according to a scathing report from an IT consultant. The problems led to hours-long delays for voters looking to cast ballots and raised questions about the overall efficacy of e-voting.