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E-voting Patches Skew Election? 629

Posted by michael from the many-more-of-these-to-come dept.
Whammy666 writes "Wired magazine has an interesting story of how the much-maligned Diebold E-voting machines were allegedly secretely patched before Georgia state's 2002 gubernatorial election. The patches were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials. The election produced an upset which ended in a major upset that defied all polls. A Diebold contractor tells a worrysome tale of how close to a third of the machines were crashing or locking up and how his tests showed the machines producing errors up to 25%. There are no paper audit trails with these systems so it's nearly impossible to check for fraud or malfunction after an actual election."
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E-voting Patches Skew Election? More

E-voting Patches Skew Election?

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  • Well, what do you expect? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:04PM (#7242374) Homepage Journal
    A Diebold contractor tells a worrysome tale of how close to a third of the machines were crashing or locking up and how his tests showed the machines producing errors up to 25%.

    As I recall, these voting machines are running Windows. Are we surprised? Perhaps these things should be running a dedicated embedded OS, or a trusted Linux, even OS X, but not Windows. Especially with all of the security concerns.

    • The problem is with their programming more than it is with the OS. As much fun as it is to bash Microsoft, this sounds like it's mostly Diebold's fault.
      • The problem is with their programming more than it is with the OS. As much fun as it is to bash Microsoft, this sounds like it's mostly Diebold's fault.

        Based on the article, I'd say it's both.

        Williams does acknowledge, however, that a month and a half before the November election, he worked with Diebold to apply a patch to the Windows CE operating system. The voting machines run on version 3.0 of Windows CE, he said, and they patched it to correct problems they were having with the system.

        Although I ad

        • The voting machines run on version 3.0 of Windows CE, he said, and they patched it to correct problems they were having with the system.

          Still, that's a problem with Diebold, not necessarily MS.
          Requirement definition prior to choosing the tool to do the job. C'mon...how many times have we looked at a requirement, and had to check out several different tools which may or may not do the job? And then had to throw out most, or all but one, when implementing it?
          If CE was not up to the task when they started
  • Sometimes, the best tool for the job does not involve technology.
    • I'd like to see a non-technological solution to recording approximately 100 million votes. Remember, you can't make 10 million golf pencils out of thin air...
      • 10 million is not really an inconceivable number of golf pencils...

        But wouldn't you rather the votes be marked in pen?
      • I'd like to see a non-technological solution to recording approximately 100 million votes.

        You'd need:

        • 100 million slips of paper
        • 10 million golf pencils - (not hard to make)
        • 20,000 polling stations manned with 5 volunteers each
        • 1 call center in each state + 1 national headquarters, each equipped with a 1950s technology phone switchboard, couple dozen volunteers and some old fashioned adding machines

        Theoretically, you could have the nationwide election results within 2 hours. 1 Hour for each local volu

  • Who didn't see this coming?

    SealBeater
    • Because I thought someone would have just hacked the system to declare "Micky Mouse" or "Jack Vilenti" as the winner in any election. That's way more fun than just plain 'ol subversion of real results...
  • and with the economy/war effort going as poorly as they are, how exactly do you expect W to assure "reelection"? Considering the the top Diebold executive is a state Bush campaign manager and has guaranteed that he'll "get out the vote", why does any of this seem surprising? Considering that W has directed millions of dollars of federal monies to Diebold to replace those old, "untrustworthy" voting machines, why does this shock?

    Voters are fickle. Voting machines you "own" are forever.

    • One one hand: Bush enjoys an ailing economy, a trillion dollar deficit, the quagmire in Iraq, no found weapons of mass destruction, disturbing leaks about CIA spies, still haven't found Osama bin Laden, still haven't found the anthrax killer, the Taliban is regrouping in Afghanistan, and he's looking to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare.

      One the other hand, the CEO of Diebold is a major Bush supporter.

      Put it all together, and I smell a Bush victory in 2004!

  • The problem with this kind of story is ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:06PM (#7242412) Homepage Journal
    ... it's in Wired. Not on, say, Fox News. (Although it would have been, no doubt, if it had been Democrats rather than Republicans doing all the screwy stuff.)

    Even if every techie in the world knows how screwed up the voting machines are, it's not going to do any good until Joe Sixpack is hearing about it over dinner. I would be willing to bet that right now, the majority of voters don't give a damn what kind of voting machine they use, and of those who do, the majority assume that anything newer and sleeker and higher-tech is thereby more reliable. The number of people who have any understanding of the problem is growing, but it's still tiny.

    What I want to know is, why aren't the politicians who have the most to lose from this issue making more noise about it? Since right now it's mostly the Republicans who seem to be benefitting, seems to me every Democratic candidate should be yelling for a major investigation right now. That's certainly what I'd expect if the situation were reversed.
    • Both democrats and republicans are interchaneable parts as far as I'm concerned.

      "What are you going to do? You have to vote for one of us!"

      "We'll vote independent!"

      "Go ahead! Throw away your vote!"

      -Simpsons
      • It doesn't matter which one of us you vote for...either way your planet is doomed.

        DOOOOOMED!
      • The two parties do have significantly different agendas. Neither are as extreme as your run-of-the-mill third party candidate, because pleasing all of the people some of the time (which is, essentially, what democracy is supposed to do) requires fairly centrist politics. A candidate with an extreme left or right tilt would disenfranchise far too many voters.
        • The two parties do have significantly different agendas.

          Wrong. As soon as you understand this, you'll understand every politician a whole lot better:

          The agenda of both policical parties is to get power and to hold onto it. It's that simple. The policies (e.g., tax the rich vs. give to the poor, less government vs. more programs) are only a means to an end.
  • Which would you prefer, a computer picking a random candidate or a person picking a random candidate. At least a computer wouldn't vote based solely upon Democratic & Republican lines and wouldn't have a name recognition bias.

    Yes I'm kidding.
    • Maybe the computer should just compare the heights of the candidates and choose whichever is taller? Seems to work for most people.
  • I don't want to say that wired.com steals other people's stories. They certainly didn't steal my story this time

    But I would like to point out that i wrote a piece [eastbayexpress.com] about this sort of stuff a while back.
  • Mandate these machines be used in *every* election, as is!

    Seriously, is *anyone* seriously looking at using these machines on a large scale? Are we geeks the only ones who hear/care about these problems? I keep expected the situation to "resolve itself," but that may not happen!
    • The fear of what happened in Florida has driven many states to choose solutions such as Diebold, just to avoid embarassment. It seems to me that Georgia may have simply shifted that risk of embarassment to an all new system.

  • This is a disaster (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FunWithHeadlines ( 644929 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:09PM (#7242446) Homepage
    "She said the practice of patching systems after they've been certified opens the possibility for anyone -- from Diebold employees to local election officials -- to install malicious code on a machine that could alter election results and then delete itself to avoid detection."

    Elections in this, and many other countries, have a long history of fraud. The obtaining of power is so important to some people they will do whatever is necessary to get and maintain it. You can be certain that if there is a way to manipulate results without detection, the temptation will be too great. Countless examples riddle American election history, and yes, from both major parties.

    But this is the worst of all. Closed-sourced, buggy, patched (with what? we don't know) after certification electronic voting machines represent power without accountability. Read that again: Power without accountability. That is a recipe for disaster. All you have to do is patch things your way and, voila, you get some "odd" election results that contradict all the polls, but who cares? You're in power now, baby!

    This is a huge story, and I'm glad to see Wired covering it. But this belongs on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and on every evening newscast. Why don't we see it there? Ask yourself who owns these voting machine companies. Now ask yourself who owns the mainstream media companies. Connect the dots.

  • Let's see if I have this right.

    A Republican congressman owns a company that sells voting machines

    The voting machines are closed source with no audit trail

    The voting machines are easily manipulated by anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge of excel

    untested and uncertified patches are known to have been placed on voting machines prior to elections

    Republicans continue to defy odds and win elections that polls show them losing

    ----
    This happened in Alabama in the latest election for our governor. Initial results showed that the incumbant democrat had won the election, then a last minute change in the figures from a district with a republican in charge of election certification swung the election to the Republican. There was no recourse for the democratic incumbant.
    • And a corrupt Democrat in that situation would have done exactly the same thing. Neither side is better or worse than the other.

      It is evidently up to us to keep those fools straight.
      Demand code and process verification prior to the election. Run test after test, in public. Audit the test results. Lock the code and machines away, by a 3rd party, until actual use. Audit the results.
    • Ah, yes, just with a moderate amount of knowledge.

      But what about liberals with liberal knowledge? Surely we must be worried about them.
    • Dude, maybe the poll are wrong. Come on, if you voted for some unpopular jackass, would you then come out of the machine and then tell the whole frigging state?
      • Maybe. Let's go check to see what people really voted for and compare that against what the machine reported.

        Except we can't, and that's the whole point. It casts doubt on the entire election process. More doubt is cast based on the fact that a member of Party A produced the machines and then another member of Party A won the election even though it was expected that Party B would win.

        That's the entire point - we don't know. It makes absolutely no difference what "Party A" and "Party B" are - which

    • But then again you need them to make your argument.

      List all the elections won where they were clearly losing in the polls. Come on, do it. Just like the bald faced lie in this Wire article you point to no major poll (by link please) the backs your claim.

      I live in Georgia, Barnes was out because the teachers wanted him out. North Georgia wanted him out - as he was trying to show an unpopular road project down the necks of many people. It was going to be close, and polls showed that. Why do you think Rep
      • ok, how about this one:

        http://www.firstcoastnews.com/politics/articles / 20 02-11-05/perdue_barnes.asp

        "Perdue said there was no mystery about his victory, despite a pre-election poll suggesting Barnes was virtually a shoo-in."

        http://www.firstcoastnews.com/politics/articles/ 20 02-10-21/barnes_cleland.asp

        And the poll:

        "Democratic incumbents are leading the two big races on the Georgia ballot next month, a new survey indicates. Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes leads Republican Sonny Perdue 48 percent to 39 perce

    • It doesn't matter if Democrats would do it, too. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:52PM (#7243078) Homepage Journal
      Some have stated that Democrats would rig the voting machines, give the chance.

      Others have asked for an enumeration of polls that were contradicted by election results, and of course cast doubt on the polls, themselves.

      None of this matters a single bit. Three things matter:

      1: The CEO of a company that makes voting machines expresses a political preference and a will to see that preference follow through elections.

      2: There appears to be no public audit process for code, patches, or patch installation for those voting machines.

      3: (and this is the biggie) As a result of 1 and 2, I have very little faith in any results delivered by these voting machines.

      NEWS LIKE THIS ERODES MY FAITH IN ELECTIONS IN THE USA. (further)

      There is no way that this is anything but bad news.

      Voting machines need security and transparency that can satisfy geeks nationwide, or at least let us know where we are, for those who simply can't be satisfied.

  • Keep It Simple, Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sssmashy ( 612587 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:13PM (#7242518)

    Harris acknowledged no proof exists that anyone rigged the election systems, but she said, "We'll never know exactly what happened in Georgia because there's no paper trail to verify the votes."

    You can't beat the Canadian ballot for simplicity and effectiveness. The voter uses a pen to mark a box next to the candidate's name on a simple, clearly laid out paper card. The voter then places the card in the ballot box. It's basically idiot-proof.

    The ballots are fully counted, by humans, within hours of the polls closing. No hanging chads, no electronic errors or confusion. A paper trail exists, so recounts are simple. It's been this way for decades and there have never been any real issues with the system.

    What's so hard about that?

    • Well, for one thing there is a lot less need for a post-election media circus that employs all sorts of anchors, pundits, makeup artists, cameramen, reporters, lawyers, judges, etc, etc, etc.

      Canadian elections are generally pretty dull.

      • purpose? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SubtleNuance ( 184325 )
        If "Dull" means Serious, Worthwhile Political Discourse devoid of exploitation by a cirus of anchors, pundits, makeupartists, cameraman, reporters, lawyers, judges, etc, etc, then Im glad our elections are "dull".

    • But..but.. How do you make that system XML and .Net compliant?

      Seriously, we Americans have erroneously jump on the "Upgrade everything!" bandwagon lately. Some things just work the way they are, simple. Can they be upgraded or made more efficient? Maybe. But only with a lot of research and common sense, not by blindly throwing half-assed hardware/software at it and seeing what sticks.

      K-I-S-S indeed!
    • It doesn't scale well. The population of Canada is about an order of magitude smaller than the population of the US. The Election officials and staffers in the US are already overworked as it is, even with the votes counted electronically. That system is also extremely labor intensive, which is why the US started switching to mechanical voting years ago.

    • Agreed. Although in some parts of Canada, the governments want to use some kind of electronic voting machines so the results are known faster after the closing of the polls. Personnally, I think the time it takes to manually count the ballots is already pretty short, so I don't see the point of changing voting procedure for another one.

      The other thing to kkep in mind is that for a lot (all?) of local/statewide elections in the States, there are multiple things for the votes to vote on: propositions A to ZZ

  • ME -- not suprised

  • A quick review of known Diebold problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frankie ( 91710 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:18PM (#7242567) Journal
    Most of this is discussed in detail at BlackBoxVoting [blackboxvoting.org]. Bev Harris has a /. account; she'll probably have lots to say.
    1. Audit by security researchers [google.com] reveal serious vulnerabilities
    2. Diebold downloaded ongoing ballots [google.com] (a federal crime) during California's last election (not the recall)
    3. The whole "Rob-Georgia" fiasco that Wired is writing about
    4. Diebold's executives are uniformly partisan political donors [opensecrets.org]
    5. Diebold's CEO is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year".
    Note that #4 and #5, while annoying, would not actually be problems except for necessary paranoia about #1-3. Voting machines need to be absolutely above reproach, since they are the ultimate instruments of modern democracy.

  • ...so it's nearly impossible to check for fraud or malfunction after an actual election.

    Were you sleeping in civics class?

    Everyone knows that the electoral system is solidly-based upon secure principles of operation. These principles were established long ago and are still operating in the electronic age. The specific details may vary, but the basic mechanics persists.

    Positively and undeniably, election winners are exactly those people that have been best able to use money and power to fool the most pe

  • EVERYONE and I mean EVERYONE who consulted with Diebold recommend they add a simple thermal printer (ala gas station pumps) to allow the voter to walk out with a ballot confirmation that had a serial number and their votes. Some even recommended the ballot be paper, but created on the electronic machines. Confirmation on paper vis barcode AND the votes printed on the receipt (which would be then put in the ballot box to be scanned vis barcode later) Without this small bit of confirmation, the votes just go

  • Evoting? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bendebecker ( 633126 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:18PM (#7242578) Journal
    I can see it now: Kevin Mitnick wins the first 100% evoting election by landslide of 7 billion votes.
  • On 14 October, The Independent [independent.co.uk] ran summary story [independent.co.uk] and an investigative report [independent.co.uk] on this very same story. Nice to see Wired and various online outlets looking into this; why hasn't there been more coverage in the mainstream press, though?
  • For anyone who's been following Georgia politics for a long time, Republican success in the 2002 election was no surprise. Naturally, I could write book about all the factors that finally came to a head. A short version: Georgia is, and has been, a fairly conservative state. The before Roy Barnes and Max Cleland, most democrats holding statewide office were your old-fashioned southern dems, not the kind of dems that your average slashdot reader thinks of. Just yesterday former (conservative democrat and se
  • It was a 50-50 shot at Perdue winning the Governorship, the Senate race was never close.

    Its tripe like that comment that makes mountains out of molehills.

    If anything they are less prone to fraud as the dead cannot cast an eletronic ballot. That is a big change in Georgia where more than one township has had more votes than people before.

    Face it, the people who cheat/steal elections using the old tech want to prevent their loss of power. They don't want something they don't have established means of che
  • How about the actual ballot machine, generate a paper trail that is deposited into a ballot box, for verification purposes.

    Here is what I envision:

    Jane Shmoe walks up to the machine, and makes her votes. The Ballot machine, electronically tallies the votes, and makes sure that Jane is not some ignorant slut (appologies to SNL), and doesn't over or under vote.

    The last thing the machine does, is printout, punchout or otherwise creates a document that is deposited into the ballot box (with verification of e
  • Come on - if this was done in Burma or Chechnya, it would be all over the papers. Thank God at least Wired still has some guts.

    What do you want to bet that Diebold wins the contract to do any upcoming Iraqi elections ?
  • Maybe their is some sort of unwritten rule, "You don't rat on my vote fraud, I won't rat on yours, may the biggest fraud win," sort of thing. Maybe machines were crashing because both sides tried to hack them at the same time.

    This is part of a worrying trend. We don't hold elections to determine a winner. No one argues when you tell them they've won. We hold elections to determine the losers. More and more, the losers are refusing to admit they lost. Politics is looking more and more like a street br
  • I've worked at three large banks before where the password for nearly every machine was "passw0rd" or "password!"... and now this. Where are the super villians who have the guts to go and take advantage of stuff like this? It's just a waste of a good election machine if the votes aren't being bought with gold coins by a dark moustachioed man with a Turkish accent of some kind.
  • I posted this last time this subject came up and it will probably be modded down as a conspiracy theory again but there is way too much smoke here for there not to be a fire.

    Chances are since at least 9/11 and probably since 2000 the Republican's in concert with Machiavellians in the defense/intelligence establishment with their flunkies Diebold and Batelle have opted to rig American elections to insure Republican's take and hold power.

    There's been one case after another where Republican's are gaining pow
  • The idea makes perfect sense. Instead of a punch card ballot, you have a computer screen, click or push what you want. The system asks "This is what you said. Is this right?" A person says "yes" or "no, I want to change my votes", makes whatever changes, and it's done.

    It's so simple, even a Florida voter couldn't get it wrong.

    I hate it.

    I'm sure there are those out there going "But John - you're a geek. It's computer based - what's wrong with that?"

    Simple: verifiability.

    The biggest problem with th
  • An open system, where everyone can see exactly what is going on, is extremely important in any venue where people are fighting for power. In politics and elections, everyone's trying to screw over the other person and grab as much power as possble. Electronic voting must not be a black box - it must be a clear, glass box where anyone who is interested can see exactly what is going on.

  • less acountability than ATMs and gambling machines (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) * on Friday October 17, 2003 @08:08PM (#7245537) Homepage Journal
    The gaming commission in Nevada requires very strict analysis of gambling machines before they are deployed, and periodic audits of the machines (including firmware verification!) to make sure they haven't been tampered with.

    Your bank puts a lot of effort into making sure that their ATM machines don't have problems. This isn't because of government regulations, it's because they don't want to lose money! (Note that many of these ATMs are made by the same Diebold that is now making the unauditable voting machines. If your bank were in charge of voting, you can bet that Diebold would be making much better voting machines.)

    Yet the government has essentially no standards for voting machines! How is it that we as a society care more about gambling and convenient access to cash than we do about voting?

    The ACLU may have been right to challenge the equipment used in the recent California recall election, but their argument was completely bass-ackwards. They claimed that the four counties using punched card ballots were unfairly discriminating against minorities. Ironically, it is ONLY in those four counties that the voters (including minorities) can have even the slightest degree of certainty that their vote was in fact counted correctly as they cast it.

    We need open-source designs for voting machine hardware and software. There should be at least one, and possibly several designs which are made publicly available for scrutiny, and fully public domain so that no royalties need be paid to use them. Then the counties can put out bid requests, and any manufacturer could produce them. However, the bidding requirements should include that the machine and software has to conform exactly to the published plans. Any deviations must be preapproved, and must be published and in the public domain.

    Note that this means that both the software and hardware must be open-sourced.

    And even then, it will still be necessary to have plenty of auditing to make sure the machines aren't tampered with. There should be internal printers for audit trails. And, like the gambling machines, it will be necessary to verify that the software integrity routinely.

    The normal technique used to verify the software in electronic gambling machines has been to use ROM verifiers. The auditor actually removes the firmware chips from the machine, puts them into a verifier, and compares them against known-good images. (The software was subjected to intensive scrutiny when the machine was approved by the gaming commission, but in the case of open-source code for voting machines, it could get even more intense scrutiny.)

    Newer machines, starting with the Odyssey machine from Silicon Gaming, store game code on a hard drive. The ROM code refuses to load code that isn't digitally signed. So they still use the ROM verifier, but now verifying the ROM proves that the software on disc is correct as well.

    A voting machine shouldn't even need a hard drive, though. In fact, it's much better if it does not have one. Aside from the paper log, writing the data to a write-only medium would be preferred. The list of items to be voted on (candidates, ballot measures, etc.) could be supplied to the machine on a flash card, and the contents of the card could be digitally signed by the election officials.

    The drives for the removable media should be in physically locked containers. Of course, the machine as a whole needs to be physically secured against tampering such that attempts to do so will be easily detected by the poll workers. Tamper detectors should also log messages to both the paper audit trail and the machine-readable log.

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