Group says e-voting paper trail wouldn't improve security
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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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Swiss authorities hailed as a success a test of Internet voting in a national referendum, even as computer security experts remain skeptical that any online balloting could ever be secure using current technologies.
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Maryland's highest court has  rejected a challenge to the state's electronic voting system  and upheld a ruling that touchscreen-style voting machines  provide a reasonable level of ballot security.
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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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A think tank warns that a backup won't improve electronic voting systems, just increase costs.
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Friday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports on a controversial decision by Missouri's Secretary of State: the state of Missouri will be allowing soldiers stationed overseas to cast ballots via e-mail. Their absentee ballots will be scanned and converted to PDF files, which will be emailed to the Defense Department, printed out, and then faxed to Missouri.  I'm in favor of helping soldiers vote; this is a democracy, everyone should be able to vote. Yet I'm deeply skeptical of this proposal, for two reasons:  The plan depends on e-mailed ballots being printed out and faxed by the Defense Department but does not provide any safeguards against soldiers being sanctioned for how they have voted;  The transmission method is inherently technically insecure
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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. They recommended new procedures for states and counties to put in place before Election Day.
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(InfoWorld) - With hotly contested nationwide elections just weeks away, several computer experts Thursday questioned the reliability and security of e-voting systems during a congressional committee hearing. Access doors of thousands of Diebold AcuVote-TS touch-screen systems can all be opened with the same key -- a type commonly used for office furniture, jukeboxes and hotel minibars, Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten told the committee. That door protects the removable memory card that stores votes. "Though some claim that election procedures will prevent the kinds of problems we identified, the rigid procedures described in vendor manuals are often ignored in practice," said Felten, co-author of a study that was highly critical of Diebold Election Systems' AccuVote TS. Also today, the Committee on House Administration took no action on legislation proposed by Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) aimed at remedying e-voting vulnerabilities. The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (HR 550), introduced last February, now has more than 200 bipartisan co-sponsors. Among its various provisions, HR 550 would mandate that each machine produce a paper receipt that could be used in a recount. The bill also calls for e-voting vendors to offer greater transparency to their software. By not sending the bill to the floor for a vote, the committee missed any chance of ensuring that November's elections would produce auditable results, Holt said. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 was aimed at preventing the sort of notorious failures such as occurred in Florida in 2000 due to disputes over manually operated punch-card systems. Some $3 billion was earmarked under HAVA to fund state compliance, with most of that money going to purchase e-voting gear, said committee chairman Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.) in his opening remarks for the hearing. "Though HAVA did not require the adoption of any particular kind of technology, many jurisdictions purchased electronic voting systems because they felt these systems were best able to meet the requirements of HAVA," said Ehlers. "Not surprisingly, some jurisdictions using this new equipment for the first time have encountered some difficulties," he said. Ehlers cited recent problems with e-voting gear in Montgomery County, Md. Earlier this week, Ehlers submitted an amendment to HAVA to reimburse any voting jurisdictions that print out paper ballots for voters who prefer not to cast their votes on touch-screen voting gear this November. Similar legislation was filed by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in the Senate. The bill calls for up to 75 cents to be spent per paper ballot. Ehlers estimated that it would probably cost no more than $10 million, based on the estimate of the number of voters in precincts using touch-screen gear that don't offer a paper trail. He told Computerworld he offered the amendment because he didn't expect HR 550 to be passed this year. "We thought in light of the problems we've seen, most recently in Maryland, that collectively, these problems were shaking voters' confidence," he said. "We thought if jurisdictions want to give voters another choice, we should support them in that." Ehlers declined to predict when or if the emergency amendment would pass. Like all House members, Ehlers is up for re-election this year, and his district uses e-voting gear. "Certainly, any voting system that is not verifiable and auditable is of concern," he said.
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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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Experts say the voting group phenomenon may be a myth.
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Lovers of democracy, turn away now The Open Rights Group (ORG) has condemned the May 2007 pilots of e-voting and electronic vote counting in the English and Scottish local elections, saying the technology involved is simply not suitable for use in statutory elections.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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Electronic voting machines should not be used in the United States without a paper-based backup to ensure they tally votes correctly, computer experts working for the U.S. government say.
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A judge said it would be too costly to allow voters skeptical of electronic voting systems to opt for paper ballots.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the federal board that oversees elections technology, has approved a testing and certification program for electronic-voting systems. The three-member EAC voted unanimously to approve a manual for testing and certification of e-voting machines, the first testing program conducted by the U.S. government. The program, which allows the federal government to decertify voting machines that fail to meet security standards, will hold e-voting machine vendors accountable and help ensure accurate election results, said Brian Hancock, director of voting systems certification at the EAC. Although the testing program is voluntary, more than 35 states have passed laws requiring federal certification of voting machines. "We would hope that all states would realize the benefits of this," said Commissioner Gracia Hillman, during an EAC meeting Thursday. The testing and certification program includes a quality monitoring program to review voting machine manufacturing plants and testing in the field. Security requirements in the program will be outlined in voting system guidelines, with a new version to be delivered to the EAC by its Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) in July. EAC Chairman Paul DeGregorio called the adoption of the testing program guidelines a "landmark step in federal oversight of elections." Critics of e-voting machines have blasted them as "black boxes" that depend on internal software functioning correctly for accurate election results. Without independent audit mechanisms, direct record electronic (DRE) machines have no way of double-checking election results, critics say. But the testing program will help improve the quality of e-voting machines, Hancock said. "It's going to improve transparency" in the voting process, he said. Also on Thursday, the EAC heard a report from TGDC Chairman William Jeffrey, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), on the first steps it has taken toward the new voting system guidelines. The TGDC on Tuesday approved a proposal requiring future e-voting machines to include independent audit mechanisms, such as voter-verified paper trail printouts. The TGDC will also encourage new audit technologies that could replace printouts as independent audit mechanisms, Jeffrey said. Critics of paper trail audits say printers can jam or break, slowing the voting process. Much of the EAC discussion about the TGDC report centered around press reports that NIST had advocated independent audits in a November paper saying DREs without audit mechanisms "cannot be made secure or highly reliable." NIST as a whole did not agree on the draft paper but staff members wrote it to simulate discussion at the TGDC meeting earlier this week, Jeffrey said. DeGregorio questioned where the authors of the NIST paper got their information when there were relatively few reports of e-voting problems in November's general election. At last count, 102 of more than 6,700 U.S. voting jurisdictions experienced some kind of voting problem in the Nov. 7 election, according to the EAC. NIST gathered its information from a variety of sources, including local election officials, TGDC members and media reports, Jeffrey said. "Clearly, there were issues that popped up," he said. This week, e-voting machine vendors said they have no problem with the TGDC's proposal for independent audit mechanisms, said Michael Kerr, director of the Election Technology Council at the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a trade group representing e-voting machine vendors. E-voting machine vendors "will build voting machines that comply" with the wishes of their customers, Kerr said. The new version of the voluntary voting system guidelines being developed by the TGDC will not likely go into effect until 2010 or later.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Group says popular technique threatens U.S. security by sidelining other approaches more suited to decryption and the like.
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A federal advisory panel on Monday rejected a recommendation that states use only voting machines that produced results that could be independently verified.