Security Of Electronic Voting Is Condemned
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Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
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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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If you think the country is divided and rancorous about the presidential contest, try polling a few experts about the accuracy and security of electronic voting.
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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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A professor and a couple of grad students have their way with one of Diebold's electronic voting machines -- most recently used in the Maryland primary -- uploading malicious programs and developing a virus that can spread those programs between machines. Diebold cries foul.
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A computer crash that forced a pre-election test of electronic voting machines to be postponed was trumpeted by critics as proof of the balloting technology's unreliability.
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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - A computer crash that forced a pre-election test of electronic voting machines to be postponed was trumpeted by critics as proof of the balloting technology's unreliability...
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ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND - Poll observers in about 6 percent of Maryland's precincts recorded 201 problems with electronic voting machines during the Nov. 2 general election, according to a report released Tuesday by TrueVoteMD.org.
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While most experts appear to agree that electronic voting has real problems, few argue that they could completely undermine the November election.
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After a series of tests on e-voting machines, a U.S. government auditor still doesn&#39;t know what contributed to 18,000 unmarked ballots in a Florida congressional race in 2006.The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) checked the firmware and the ballot display and ran calibration tests on a sample of Election Systems &amp; Software (ES&amp;S) iVotronic e-voting machines, the agency said in a report released Friday. Those tests, combined with others done by the GAO and state of Florida, &quot;have significantly reduced the possibility that the iVotronic [machines] were the cause of the undervote,&quot; said the report, authored by Nabajyoti Barkakati, acting chief technologist for the GAO&#39;s applied research and methods division.The GAO believes the ES&amp;S machines have been adequately tested, the report says. &quot;Given the complex interaction of people, processes, and technology that must work effectively together to achieve a successful election,&quot; other factors, including intentional undervotes or ballot interaction problems, may have caused the undervote, the GAO said.Democratic candidate Christine Jennings lost by 369 votes in the 2006 13th Congressional District race, but more than 18,000 people who cast votes in other district races failed to have votes recorded in the congressional race. About 4,000 more votes were recorded in the Sarasota County Southern District Hospital Board election than in the House race.Jennings is again running for the congressional seat this year.The GAO report &quot;leaves most of the major questions unanswered,&quot; said the Verified Voting Foundation, an advocacy group critical of e-voting machines. The GAO report didn&#39;t address potential problems with touch-screen sensitivity and low batteries, or reports of undervotes in other races, the foundation said in its own report , based on a leaked copy of the GAO report.&quot;The GAO report leaves us with almost as many questions as before, and the most important one -- what caused the ... undervote problem -- is left unanswered,&quot; the foundation report says. &quot;The nature of the complex voting system in question, and the difficulty in auditing such a system, may mean such questions will remain indefinitely, but it is clear that more can and should be done to resolve the outstanding issues.&quot;The foundation suggested auditors could conduct more tests, including tests of touch-screen sensitivity and a check for software bugs beyond the GAO&#39;s check that the software matched versions certified by Florida.&quot;As someone who&#39;s interested in what happened in this election, my questions aren&#39;t answered,&quot; said David Dill, the foundation&#39;s founder and a computer science professor at Stanford University. &quot;I don&#39;t think we&#39;re going to get any idea about what happened in that election without a lot more investigation.&quot;The GAO report &quot;cannot be interpreted as a clean bill of health for the machines,&quot; Dill added. &quot;They did three little tests ... out of a spectrum of a lot of things, and they aren&#39;t the most important things to look at,&quot; he said.ES&amp;S, in a statement, said the GAO report shows its machines &quot;performed well&quot; in the election. GAO&#39;s findings echo studies by Florida State University and the Florida Department of State, both saying there was &quot;no evidence&quot; of ES&amp;S machine malfunction, the company said. &quot;The collective findings of these and other tests demonstrate that Sarasota County&#39;s voting system performed exactly as it was designed to function,&quot; the company said.The Election Technology Council, a trade group representing ES&amp;S and three other e-voting vendors, said the report suggests that a paper ballot to accompany the e-voting machines wouldn&#39;t necessarily solve problems. The Verified Voting Foundation and other groups have pushed for printouts to be used with e-voting machines.Elections include people, processes and technology, said David Beirne, the council&#39;s executive director. &quot;Paper is not a magic bullet,&quot; he said. &quot;It can provide an additional layer of verification for the voter, but it alone is not going to satisfy all of the stakeholders, which is why it is important to look at all of the circumstances surrounding an election to determine its overall performance.&quot;The GAO report shows the need for assurance tools that verify the operation of the e-voting machines&#39; software, Beirne added.
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A watchdog says all-postal voting should not be used in UK elections. Do you agree with these findings?
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A judge on Friday chastised state officials for botching efforts to ensure electronic voting machines are tamperproof but cleared them for use in the November election, saying it was too late now to change course.
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So-called "paper audit trails" are unlikely to solve accuracy problems associated with electronic voting and would in fact introduce another potential problem to the mix, according to a report issued Tuesday. But even some critics of current e-voting tech are discounting the ITIF's take on the matter.
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Avi Rubin, a Maryland elections judge and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, says the U.S. has moved too quickly to embrace e-voting and should take a step back to protect the sanctity of voting.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recommended that the U.S. government require touch-screen electronic voting machines to include independent audit technology, such as printouts. "The lack of an independent audit capability in systems is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections," says a NIST paper released this month. "In practical terms the software-dependent approach cannot be made secure or highly reliable." The Technical Guidelines Development Committee of the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) is scheduled to review the NIST's recommendation that direct record electronic (DRE) machines include voter-verified paper trails or other auditing mechanisms at a meeting Monday and Tuesday. DREs do not assure that voting records are accurate, and 15 states using the e-voting machines do not use independent audit mechanisms statewide, the NIST paper says. "Trust in an election outcome relies heavily upon trusting the correctness of the DRE's software and upon trusting that the DRE software has not been replaced or tampered with," the paper says. "Simply put, the DRE architecture's inability to provide for independent audits of its electronic records makes it a poor choice for an environment in which detecting errors and fraud is important." A spokesman for the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), representing e-voting machine vendors, didn't immediately return a message seeking comment on the NIST recommendations. The ITAA has argued that paper trail ballots may simply print out the same results stored on the DREs. Paper trail systems can be costly to add on to DREs, and printer breakdowns can cause problems during elections, the ITAA has said. One e-voting critic praised the report. "That's really good news," said Barbara Burt, director of the election reform program at Common Cause, one of several groups calling for e-voting paper trails. "It looks like it's going to help us finally get rid of the paperless DREs." NIST's recommendations come after scattered reports of problems with DREs in the Nov. 7 U.S. elections. In Florida's 13th congressional district, Democratic candidate Christine Jennings has filed a lawsuit asking for a revote after 18,000 voters failed to cast a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives race. Two recounts found Republican Vern Buchanan the winner of the race, but Sarasota County did not require the Elections System and Software (ES&S) e-voting machines to include paper printouts to back up the electronic vote. While e-voting supporters say the machines make it hard to undervote, Sarasota County voters cast about 16,000 more votes in the Florida governor's race and in the Florida Senate race than were recorded in the House race. About 4,000 more people cast ballots for the county's Southern District Hospital Board than were recorded in the House race. Thirty-five states either mandate voter-verified paper-trail systems or use them statewide without a mandate, according to the NIST report. But 10 states use paper-trail ballots on a county-by-county basis, and five states, including Maryland, Georgia and Louisiana, use DREs statewide without paper- trail ballots. The NIST paper published this month recommends states use "software-independent" voting systems, using either paper-trail ballots or cryptographic audit systems instead of relying on the "correctness of the software" for election results. The paper suggests that the EAC require audit mechanisms in e-voting machines, and recommends that federal election officials stop certifying e-voting machines without independent audit systems after 2009 or 2010.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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But 'Gi-Fi' pointless without robust security
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Consumers feel passwords no longer enough protection for online transactions.