Folks–the danger of electronic voting fraud is not gonna go away until we all demand it loudly enough. So along with our concern about Democrats vs Republicans and Iraq and Lebanon and global warming and everything else we are concerned about, we need to pay attention to this. The following little collection is from the latest issue of “Election Integrity News” which you can receive weekly by going to http://www.votetrustusa.org/subscribe.html . At the end of this email is an online action alert supporting the best bill in Congress (currently blocked by House Republican leadership) for electronic voting reform.
Pull The Plug
by Aviel Rubin, Johns Hopkins University
You don’t like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives.
This article appeared on Forbes.com. It is reposted with permission of the author.
I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p with a GPS unit, and I chose my car (Infiniti M35x) because it had the most gadgets of any vehicle in its class. My 7- year-old daughter uses e-mail. So why am I advocating the use of 17th- century technology for voting in the 21st century–as one of my critics puts it?
The 2000 debacle in Florida spurred a rush to computerize voting. In 2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which handed out $2.6 billion to spend on voting machines. Most of that cash was used to acquire Direct Recording Electronic voting machines.
Yet while computers are very proficient at counting, displaying choices and producing records, we should not rely on computers alone to count votes in public elections. The people who program them make mistakes, and, safeguards aside, they are more vulnerable to manipulation than most people realize. Even an event as common as a power glitch could cause a hard disk to fail or a magnetic card that holds votes to permanently lose its data. The only remedy then: Ask voters to come back to the polls. In a 2003 election in Boone County, Ind., DREs recorded 144,000 votes in one precinct populated with fewer than 6,000 registered voters. Though election officials caught the error, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where such mistakes would go undetected until after a victor has been declared.
Consider one simple mode of attack that has already proved effective on a widely used DRE, the Accuvote made by Diebold. It’s called overwriting the boot loader, the software that runs first when the machine is booted up. The boot loader controls which operating system loads, so it is the most security- critical piece of the machine. In overwriting it an attacker can, for example, make the machine count every fifth Republican vote as a Democratic vote, swap the vote outcome at the end of the election or produce a completely fabricated result. To stage this attack, a night janitor at the polling place would need only a few seconds’ worth of access to the computer’s memory card slot.
Further, an attacker can modify what’s known as the ballot definition file on the memory card. The outcome: Votes for two candidates for a particular office are swapped. This attack works by programming the software to recognize the precinct number where the machine is situated. If the attack code limits its execution to precincts that are statistically close but still favor a particular party, it goes unnoticed.
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One might argue that one way to prevent this attack is to randomize the precinct numbers inside the software. But that’s an argument made in hindsight. If the defense against the attack is not built into the voting system, the attack will work, and there are virtually limitless ways to attack a system. And let’s not count on hiring 24-hour security guards to protect voting machines.
DREs have a transparency problem: You can’t easily discover if they’ve been tinkered with. It’s one thing to suspect that officials have miscounted hanging chads but something else entirely for people to wonder whether a corrupt programmer working behind the scenes has rigged a computer to help his side.
My ideal system isn’t entirely Luddite. It physically separates the candidate selection process from vote casting. Voters make their selections on a touchscreen machine, but the machine does not tabulate votes. It simply prints out paper ballots with the voters’ choices marked. The voters review the paper ballots to make sure the votes have been properly recorded. Then the votes are counted; one way is by running them through an optical scanner. After the polls close, some number of precincts are chosen at random, and the ballots are hand counted and compared with the optical scan totals to make sure they are accurate. The beauty of this system is that it leaves a tangible audit trail. Even the designer of the system cannot cheat if the voters check the printed ballots and if the optical scanners are audited.
Aviel Rubin, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and author of Brave New Ballot: The Battle To Safeguard Democracy In The Age Of Electronic Voting.
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New Zogby Poll on Electronic Voting Attitudes
by Michael Collins for Scoop Indedendent Media – August 21, 2006
New Zogby Poll: It’s Nearly Unanimous – Voters Insist On Right To Observe Vote Counting Plus Other Findings From This Unique Poll
Part I of a Two Part Series.
This article was originally published by “Scoop†Independent Media and is reprinted by permission of the author.
A recent Zogby poll documents ground breaking information on the attitudes of American voters toward electronic voting. They are quite clear in the belief that the outcome of an entire election can be changed due to flaws in computerized voting machines. At a stunning rate of 92%, Americans insist on the right to watch their votes being counted. And, at an overwhelming 80%, they strongly object to the use of secret computer software to tabulate votes without citizen access to that software.
The American public is clear in its desire for free, fair, and transparent elections. An 80%-90% consensus on the right to view vote counting and opposition to secrecy by voting machine vendor is both rare and remarkable in American politics. If only the public knew that these options are virtually non existent in today’s election system.
Viewing vote counting will soon become a process of watching computers, somewhat akin to watching the radio, but without sound. Secret vote counting with computer software that citizens cannot review is now a fait accompli. Most contracts between boards of elections and voting equipment manufacturers bar both elections officials and members of the public from any access to the most important computer software; the source code that directs all the functions of the voting machines, including vote counting.
As a result of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a majority of these voters will be using touch screen voting machines with a lesser amount using special paper ballots counted by optical scanning devices. There are very few localities using paper ballots for the November 2006 election. If the federal government gets its way, they will be a thing of the past.
The supreme irony is that HAVA was sold to Congress as the solution to the problems of the Florida 2000 election. Of course, we now know that as many as 50,000 black Floridians were wrongly removed from the voting rolls through a highly suspect “felon purge†that missed felons but captured legitimate registered voters. And we know further that over 100,000 ballots in mostly black precincts were disqualified due to the old voter suppression standby, “spoiled ballots. †Neither of those voting rights and civil rights problems is addressed by HAVA. It’s all about “the machines.†Read the Entire Article at: http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1696&Itemid=26″
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Representatives Grijalva and Holt Call For Accessible Balloting, Verifiable Election Results
By Natalie Luna, Office of U.S. Representative Raúl Grijalva
August 16, 2006
Congressional Leaders Stress Need For Electronic Voting Machine Safeguards
“This is not an either-or proposition-that we’ll trade safeguards on electronic voting machines in exchange for accepting dubious voter ID requirements.”
In Tuscon, Arizona, U.S. Representatives Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) joined local elected officials and representatives of Common Cause and VoteTrustUSA in calling on Congress to pass legislation to make electronic voting machines secure and their results verifiable, and to ensure easy access to polling places for all citizens. “How can we as a nation, secure democracy around the world, monitor free and fair elections in other countries when we cannot ensure, protect and guarantee the right to vote right here at home,” said Grijalva (pictured at right). “We need to provide Congress with the authority to craft a voting system that is inclusive of all Americans and guarantees that all votes will be counted in a complete, fair and efficient manner.”
“Anything of value should be auditable, and in a democracy, nothing is more valuable than a citizen’s vote,” said Holt (pctured at left). “Recent studies have reaffirmed that electronic voting machines are vulnerable both to inadvertent error and malicious tampering. We need safeguards to prevent both so that all of us can have confidence in our election results.”
Rep. Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005 (H.R. 550) would address the key issues raised by the Brennan Center report, including a requirement that all voting systems produce a voter-verified paper record for use in manual audits commencing in 2006 in accordance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) deadline. H.R. 550 currently has 206 bipartisan co-sponsors (including Rep. Grijalva) and is awaiting a hearing by the House Administration Committee.
“Congressman Holt’s bill (HR 550) is a critical first step in repairing what’s wrong with our electoral process,” observed Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy for VoteTrustUSA. “It would establish common sense nationwide election safeguards – safeguards that have been adopted in many states already, including Arizona.”
Holt made it clear that enfranchising measures like H.R. 550 are not to be traded for a potentially disenfranchising measures like bogus voter ID requirements. “This is not an either-or proposition-that we’ll trade safeguards on electronic voting machines in exchange for accepting dubious voter ID requirements,” said Holt. “We need auditable elections that are accessible to all citizens, period.”
“It is on behalf of millions of Americans who believe in and value our democratic process and the right to vote that I support this legislation,” Grijalva replied. “The application of the law must be equal. It is a tenet that we swore to uphold, and it is a basic part of life and our democracy.”
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Take Action Now: Demand that Congress Ensures Accessible and Verifiable Elections in 2006 and Beyond! http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=VTUSA&hotissue=1
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“Our German forbearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’ That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?” –Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst of 27 years, referring to the actions and crimes of the Bush Administration
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