Integrity of Florida E-Voting in Doubt
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With polls showing nearly equal numbers of Florida voters for President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the election's outcome may again hinge on a Florida recount. And the more that Floridians learn about how voting machines work, the more they question whether the 15 counties with paperless voting systems can accurately count and recount votes.
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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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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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Activists and computer programmers Wednesday demonstrated what they said were flaws with electronic voting machines that could allow hackers to change vote outcomes Nov. 2...
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Dutch go Irish IT professionals in the Netherlands have demonstrated that the type of e-voting machines chosen by the Irish government for election counts can be secretly hacked.â¦
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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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Early voters in the Sunshine State begin casting electronic ballots Monday, and it doesn't take long for the first problems to surface.
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Election officials are questioning how many of a batch of 58,000 absentee ballots reached Broward County voters who requested them more than two weeks ago. State police investigated but found no criminal violations.
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Memories of Florida's contested 2000 presidential election and a growing number of pre-election lawsuits are making Americans skeptical about a voting process they once took for granted.
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In another indictment of the reliability of electronic voting systems, a report released Friday shows some Ohio tallies could be rendered inaccurate using tools as simple as a magnet.
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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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With less than six weeks to go before the Nov. 2 presidential election, voting activists said officials still have time to set up a paper trail as a counterweight to an e-voting system they portrayed as wide open to manipulation.
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Although some have raised concerns about votes being verified, others say special safeguards secure the system.
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U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein has asked the GAO to investigate whether problems with e-voting machines have been caused by fraud or mechanical failure.
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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 team of e-voting researchers has released a report describing flaw in the e-voting machines used by 90 percent of Dutch voters. The report describes certain access problems as "strikingly similar" to those noted in Diebold's touch-screen voting machines last month.
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By Heather Civil, Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach  Feb. 8--Touch-screen voting machines, once touted as a way to cut back on the stacks of paper produced during elections, may end up making paper trails of their own.   Gov.