October 27, 2003 in Politics

Voting Box Blues

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Unfortunately, electronic voting machines don’t yet seem ready for prime time. A recent article by Steven Levy excerpted below, indicates that security experts believe that elections using current direct recording electronic voting systems (DRE) such as those produced by Diebold, have a high risk of election being stolen. So maybe states like Florida should stick to butterfly ballots until they can get it right. It just might be easier to determine who wins an election, even if you have to deal with hanging chads.

Newsweek, Nov. 3 2003 issue, Black Box Voting Blues by Steven Ley
After the traumas of butterfly ballots and hanging chad, election officials are embracing a brave new ballot: sleek, touch-screen terminals known as direct recording electronic voting systems (DRE). States are starting to replace their Rube Goldbergesque technology with digital devices like the Diebold Accu-Vote voting terminal. Georgia uses Diebolds exclusively, and other states have spent millions on such machines, funded in part by the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. Many more terminals are on the way.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE machines have “a fatal disadvantage,” says Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, who’s sponsoring legislation on the issue. “They’re unverifiable. When a voter votes, he or she has no way of knowing whether the vote is recorded.” After you punch the buttons to choose your candidates, you may get a final screen that reflects your choices—but there’s no way to tell that those choices are the ones that ultimately get reported in the final tally. You simply have to trust that the software inside the machine is doing its job.
It gets scarier. The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals can’t be trusted. Listen, for example, to Avi Rubin, a computer-security expert and professor at Johns Hopkins University who was slipped a copy of Diebold’s source code earlier this year. After he and his students examined it, he concluded that the protections against fraud and tampering were strictly amateur hour. “Anyone in my basic security classes would have done better,” he says. The cryptography was weak and poorly implemented, and the smart-card system that supposedly increased security actually created new vulnerabilities. Rubin’s paper concluded that the Diebold system was “far below even the most minimal security standards.” Naturally, Diebold disagrees with Rubin. “We’re very confident of accuracy and security in our system,” says director of Diebold Election Systems Mark Radke.




2 Comments

  1. November 4, 2004 at 9:29 pm

    Jony

    Is this like a guestbook?

  2. October 28, 2003 at 12:53 pm

    jr

    I’ve often wondered it the ballot I put in the box gets counted.
    Electronically about the only way would to give each voter a random unique ID that could be traced back to the actual counts by query. Was ID 11XX1233 in count for Candidate Y. The count would be a list of all ID’s. Only the ID Holder would know the ID. The ID would also be tied to a precinct etc. to eliminate possibe duplicates.

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