Category: e-Voting

SEATTLE – Researchers argued the pros and cons of electronic voting this weekend with the fervor of candidates on the campaign trail — but agreed on at least one point: This year’s presidential balloting has the potential to suffer more glitches than the infamous 2000 election
Continue reading “Sparks fly in e-voting debate”

The Denver Post covers the same issues that are making headlines here in Ireland. Fred Brown on the rollback of e-voting in the US.
Continue reading “E-voting still worries skeptics”

Minister Martin Cullen was on the News at One on Wednesday and was caught by Sean O’Rourke on the topic of the secret ballot. I have gone to the trouble of writing a transcript of the piece from the radio. You can listen to it in Real Audio here.

What I do not understand about this myself, is the fact the the company who makes the machines, PowerVote, say on their website that there is a facility for spoiling, or ‘non of the above’. And yes, that’s their spelling mistake, not mine.

Here is the quote from their website:

3.Now at the machine the voter is prompted via a screen to make their choices. As choices are made these are shown as confirmation in a screen.At this stage if an error is made or a change required to the selection then the CORRECTION button is pressed. If the voter wants to express a vote NON OF THE FOLLOWING then they press the ABSTAIN button. Any abstained vote shows as part of the final result totals.

I am not exactly encouraged by the volume of spelling mistakes on their website, what does that say about their programmers? Along with this is the fact that there IS a facility for a paper trail, but the Minister apparently decided not to go for it. Again here is the quote from the company website:

Q. Is an audit trail available?
A. Yes there has always been this facility within the system. We had to be able to provide this to satisfy the requirements of pilot schemes in the UK.

So the Minister succeeds in being stupid, and strains the truth. Furthermore he seems to allude to something that is not the case, he says: “But the reality of it is that we have had this system tested internationally, in Germany and Holland by respected and renowned international institutes”

That is simply not the case. On Powervote’s own site:

Q. Has the system been tested independently?
A. Independent, internationally accredited test institutes in Holland and Germany carried out rigorous tests of the system prior to certification. This was a requirement by the Dutch, German and Irish Governments, which had to be, satisfied prior to the introduction of the system.

The Irish government did not send it to Europe to get tested – PowerVote apparently had the system tested itself. Might seem like nitpicking, but Cullen is being very underhanded further on in the interview.

Read on…

Sean O’Rourke: A lot of reservations, Martin Cullen, are being expressed about the wisdom of introducing electronic voting without a matching paper trail.

Minister Martin Cullen: Well I wouldn’t say a lot of reservations, I would say there is reservations from some. But the reality of it is that we have had this system tested internationally, in Germany and Holland by respected and renowned international institutes, its been tested in Ireland. I suppose, more importantly in Ireland, over 400,000 people have used the system in the general election in pilot phase and in the referendum. And we know from there that there was no questioning of the integrity of the system following those results. No political party no individual to my knowledge, has check…questioned the integrity, and now we are going to roll out the system to the entire country. We have been four years now working on this, making sure it is right, doing all the appropriate testing and indeed checking all of the security systems that are required. And I think its important to point out that, for instance, in the last European election, there was 46,000 spoiled votes, in the last local election there was 21,000 spoiled votes. And indeed over 40 seats were decided in the local elections were decided by less than 50 votes. And we certainly know that the vast majority of people don’t go in to purposely spoil their votes. It is done because of bad hand writing, its done because of confusion in filling in the ballot paper. All of this will be eliminated….

Sean O’Rourke: I’m not sure a lot of people would agree with that Minister, it is something of a tradition if people want to say a plague on all your houses do precisely that, they spoil their votes. Now you are making that impossible for them.

Minister Cullen: Well we’re not actually, but I mean I know from many years ago, looking at spoilt ballot papers and indeed so all the political parties do, in the counting of them , and all the different issues that arise. It’s quite clear from the vast majority of ballot papers that people were not intending to spoil their ballot papers at all. So people can’t…

Sean O’Rourke: How do you spoil a vote secretly under the new system?

Minister Cullen: Of course you can. You can go to the polling station, to the polling clerk as one would have always done, be marked off the register, then you get a permit to go to the machine itself. Once you hand in that permit, you are allocated a number, if you don’t then, in other words…if you don’t follow through to vote you are actually recorded as a non vote, therefore a spoiled vote.

Sean O’Rourke: You can actually register a non-vote?

Minister Cullen: You don’t actually vote Sean. The fact that you went in, the fact that you registered, you will then come up as having participated in it, but you will not have recorded any vote. In other words it’s spoiled.

Sean O’Rourke: But I mean somebody must know at a particular point that the machine has not been activated. In other words you’ve been seen to have left and not

Minister Cullen: Oh no, the machine is individually activated and then shut off after every voter Sean.

Sean O’Rourke: But how does the machine know to shut itself off, because somebody isn’t going to vote?

Minister Cullen: Because there’s an activator at the machine, there is a returning officer at the machine who switches the machine off.

Sean O’Rourke: So the returning officer knows you don’t want to vote.

Minister Cullen: Oh well y’know you just say it yourself, you don’t want to proceed any further, and therefore the machine must be turned off after each voter

Sean O’Rourke: Where’s the secrecy in that?

Minister Cullen: Sorry?

Sean O’Rourke: Where’s the secrecy in that?

Minister Cullen: In what?

Sean O’Rourke: In spoiling your vote – to have that act known only to yourself.

Minister Cullen: No you can go to the machine Sean, you can actually you can do two things. You can cast your vote, then the machine switches itself off automatically. The person is not standing next to you looking at what you are doing. You can simply say to the returning officer…cast I’m switched… and move on. And they do that.

Sean O’Rourke: And are you saying that it’s not possible for the returning officer to know whether the vote has been used or not?

Minister Cullen: It’s a question of someone going in , if they want to deliberately spoild their votes, be registered on the basis that they spoil their vote, that’s a fact.

Sean O’Rourke: But they can’t do it in total secrecy.

Minister Cullen: No, not on a spoiled vote.

Sean O’Rourke: That’s the whole point I’m making.

Minister Cullen: Well its not the whole point really. Because what we are doing a system that is catering for about 99% of the population. I’m not going to build machines to cater for 1%, we live in a democracy and its about catering for the vast majority of people in a proper and managed way, and that’s what this system does. Far more accurately I might add than that manual voting systems we’ve had in the past.

So the Minister is absolutely happy with the new system, which, it is believed will be completely fail safe, 100% perfect software and hardware, and nothing possibly can go wrong and there is no way the system can be hacked or accidentally lose votes or give wrong votes to the wrong candidate, and that it would be too hard to put in a print mechanism for a voter verified paper trail, that absolutely nothing positively certainly can in any way go wrong, that all computer companies and programmers are 100% perfect people who cannot possibly make mistakes or that machines can work 100% of the time.

Bollocks.

Where is the Irish media on this one? Diebold. Diebold. Diebold.

Dan points to this story in the Mercury News on another e-voting scandal. This one concerns our old friend, Diebold. Huge problems here:

Concerned that their new $12.7 million Diebold electronic voting system had developed a glitch, election officials turned to a company representative who happened to be on hand.

Lucky he was there. For an unknown reason, the computerized tally program had begun to award votes for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Burton, a socialist from Southern California.

Similar mishaps have occurred across the country since election officials embraced electronic voting in the wake of the Florida vote-counting debacle of 2000.

When Californians go to the polls next month to choose a presidential candidate, many voters will cast a virtual ballot by pressing a computer touch screen that records their votes digitally. The only tangible proof that a citizen has voted — and how he voted — will be fingerprints left on the machine’s screen.

Electronic voting removes the risk of election officials misinterpreting hanging chads. But it raises another electoral peril: that a digital ballot box might miscount votes without anyone noticing.

Yet more e-voting scandal. This one from SlashDot. Apparently hackers are helping to test voting machines…theres a show on NPR.

From this story and the one on NPR, the state hired a company and set up a test voting precinct and had the group try whatever they could to break into the machines. Most of the attacks would probably be noticed by an even-half-awake poll staff, but some vulnerabilities were exposed. The net seems to be that you could really mess up individual machines, but the grail would be to get to the central collection servers and send a megavote to your favorite candidate. The last paragraph mentions problems that voting machines had in the last election in Virginia; it’s interesting to note that those use wireless networking–my jaw has dropped onto my keyboard and I can’t comment any further.”

This story keeps going, Dan has the coverage, and he is rightly going nuts.

This is crazy stuff, and I thought Diebold were bad…

More on the e-voting scandals spreadin the US. It appears that 134 voters went into vote at the machines, but failed to vote.

”It’s incomprehensible that 134 people went to the polls and didn’t cast votes,” said Lieberman, who served on the canvassing board that oversaw Tuesday night’s count. “We need to find an answer to this question.”

Lieberman has advocated adding printers to the touch-screen machines to create a paper record of each vote cast. Voters would be able to see the printout to verify it before they leave the machine, a type of technology that many states are beginning to consider.

Lieberman has asked ES&S, which also manufactured Miami-Dade County’s voting machines, to provide some answers on the nonvotes by 1:30 p.m. today, when the canvassing board meets for a state-mandated recount.

None of this would have drawn much notice had the race to fill the District 91 seat in Northeast Broward not been so breathtakingly close, said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, who survived her own recount in 2000 after designing a controversial ”butterfly” ballot.

”We always pray for large margins,” she said.

More goings-on in the long-running Diebold saga. VoteHere, a company apparently developing security for e-voting, has been hacked, and it might be the same person who hacked Diebold earlier this year.

Interestingly the authorities think its political, and not just vandalism, as they normally seem to do. Is it someone with grave concerns about democracy in the US or with motivations to hack e-voting systems in the future?

We shall see…keep an eye out for leaked memos from VoteHere.
Continue reading “Site of electronic voting firm hacked”

From Slashdot:

After a negative review of the Diebold voting machines by the State Gaming Control Board, it looks like Nevada has gone with a competitor for the upcoming election. And Secretary of State Dean Heller is requiring paper receipts. According to the Associated Press story, Nevada is the first state to do so.” There’s another story about Nevada voting machines as well. zapf writes “It appears that the major e-Voting machine vendors have banded together to form the ‘Election Technology Council.'” Reader SemperUbi writes: “Demand for a voter-verified audit trail is really gaining momentum these days. The Voter Verification Act, introduced yesterday by Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), would require a voter-verified paper audit trail, ban the use of ‘undisclosed’ software and wireless communications for voting machines, and require mandatory surprise recounts — all in time for the November 2004 election. Rep. Holt’s HR2239 in the House requires much the same thing. Resistance to both bills may focus on the aggressive timetable, but the effort is worth it — as Warren Slocum once said, democracy ain’t cheap. Take that, Diebold!” And finally, a Maryland newspaper dredges up an internal Diebold email that recommends gouging Maryland if the state wants paper printouts for its Diebold voting system.