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E-voting: In this year's national election (green) there will be an increase in use of electronic voting systems compared to 2004 (red) and 2000 (blue), according to Election Data Services.
Technology Review
The manufacturer, Diebold Election Systems, now Premier Election Solutions, disputes the conclusion. Nevertheless, in 2007, the Maryland General Assembly voted to move back to paper ballots, although it will still use e-voting machines in Tuesday's election.
More recently, in a review commissioned by the state of California, researchers at the University of California found that electronic voting machines used in that state had security issues that made them vulnerable to vote tampering. The report prompted California to require that all voting machines also produce a paper trail.
Wallach of Rice University says that touch screens can often be poorly calibrated, causing the on-screen image to be misaligned with the touch-sensitive layer of the screen. Even a properly calibrated machine may not work well for an especially tall or short person because of their angle of view, he adds.
Critics' greatest concern about electronic voting machines, however, is that they might be vulnerable to fraud. "I think it's the complexity and the lack of transparency," says Steven J. Murdoch, a computer security researcher at the University of Cambridge. "It's certainly not apparent to the ordinary voter how it works, or whether it can be tampered with."
Murdoch thinks the move towards electronic voting was driven in part by "modernization for modernization's sake. When I was calling this a bad idea, I was being called a Luddite, but I've spent most of my life working with computers."
However, David Beirne, executive director of the Election Technology Council, which represents voting-machine manufacturers, says that electronic systems are designed to solve real problems. He says that paper ballots are expensive, cumbersome, and often "spoiled" by voters who mark them incorrectly.
"Unfortunately, I think the criticisms have reached such a point that no voting system can satisfy the critics," Beirne says. He also complains that critics often present unlikely scenarios, or ones that could easily be defended against with good management practices. And they don't compare the machines against the vulnerabilities of paper ballots.
Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at MIT who has studied voting technology, agrees that paper ballots are also vulnerable to fraud. "Right now, we know a hundred different ways to corrupt paper systems that any idiot could perform. I don't know of anything that any idiot could perform on voting machines," he says. But Stewart also argues that the industry has been slow to address real security concerns that have been apparent for years.
A number of technological schemes have been suggested for fixing security problems related to electronic voting. The most common is to require that each machine generate a voter-verified paper ballot and to audit a sample of paper ballots after an election. Some states (including California) have moved towards this method.
Another proposal is to use encryption to ensure voters and observers that votes haven't been tampered with. In one such scheme, developed by Wallach and colleagues and called VoteBox, when voters completed a ballot, their identity and a record of their vote would immediately be encrypted and posted online. Each machine would also issue an encryption key to voters so that the record could be decrypted to make sure the vote had been recorded correctly.
It's worth pointing out that paper ballot fraud usually takes a lot of work (and thus many people) because of all the individual pieces of paper and has to be done apart from the voter (that is, not at the polling place).
E-voting fraud can happen with very little effort (a few people) and can be "implemented" by the (unwitting) voter as her or she tries to cast a ballot.
The need to involve more people and have a separate location presumably make paper ballot fraud easier to crack.
You may be familiar with some of the stories of manipulating electronic voting machines, including the GA meddling by Diebold in 2002: (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2008/Cybersecurity_expert_raises_allegations_of_2004_0717.html)
If we want to use electronic voting machines, contracting with private companies to build them is fraught with danger - remember Diebold's execs were Bush fundraisers!
Why not entrust the design to some people who can be expected to do a better job, like NIST. Let them develop the machines and the code, have the hardware built by anyone, then use only NIST certified software?
While hacking of electronic voting machines is very scary, it's so far theoretical (we hope). The machines have another weakness that might have a very real effect on election results: they crash. This morning I stood in line for more than 90 minutes to vote--and most of that was due to the fact the the DRE machines used in my precinct had stopped working shortly after 7 AM, and the election judges didn't get them running again until 8:30. How many people left without voting because they didn't have time to wait?
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cyberpageman
53 Comments
Text error?
"electronic voting machine usage will drop this year for the first time ever. In Tuesday's election, 37.2 percent of all ballots will be cast using an electronic voting machine, compared to 32.6 percent in 2006"
Have I missed something? A drop from 32.6% to 37.2%? That sounds like an increase.
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willknight
37 Comments
Re: Text error?
Thanks Cyberpageman, that's corrected.
It was 37.6 percent in 2006; it will be 32.6 percent this year.
If you'd like to read the full report from EDS, it can be found here: http://www.edssurvey.com/.
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