E-voting: paging Dr. DRE (and kiss my monkey)

Yay! It's IT Blogwatch, in which we examine accuracy concerns about the upcoming mid-term vote. Not to mention monkeying around with a bogus lip-balm spot...

Angela Gunn presents our interactive map:

Many Americans will head to the polls for November's midterm elections with less certainty than ever about how -- or whether -- their votes will be counted. Two years after the controversy-plagued 2004 elections, four years after HAVA (the Help America Vote Act) was passed, and six years after the Supreme Court and America romanced the hanging chad, experts are bracing for yet another wave of challenges to regional vote-counting systems.

One-third of us will use voting machines that have never before served in a general election. Legal challenges to paperless DRE (direct-recording electronic) voting technologies are proliferating across the country, and as computer scientists demonstrated earlier this year, hacking challenges to many of these machines can bear fruit even faster than demands for recounts.
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It's a lot to keep up with, especially since most of us would rather be thinking about who to vote for, not how we'll do it -- and certainly not about what might go wrong. To that end, Computerworld.com presents what you need to know for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

J. Doe is worried:

In any given race, in the presence of simple mistakes, the machines could easily favor one candidate over another, or one party over another, purely by mistake. Perhaps (though I doubt this too) nationwide neither party would benefit, but if a voting machine maker's wares are nationwide, it might not "balance out" at all. It's the arbitrary nature of such mistakes, and the nationwide reach of the manufacturers, that makes this different than distributed statistical variations.

Jon Stokes isn't stoked:

We're beginning to [see] a more detailed and depressing picture of exactly what we're up against as a nation in less than a week ... none of this news bodes well for the November mid-terms, which are less than a week away. In fact ... voters will flock to the polls to vote on fragile, untested alpha systems that, when they break, cannot be fixed by the on-site poll workers; the votes that are recorded cannot be adequately verified by a post-election audit, even if a voter-verified paper "receipt" is printed by each machine and saved by the county; and individual counties may or may not have the technical capacity to actually carry out the task of tabulating all of the electronic results (forget about the paper receipts!) from all of the machines in a coherent and reliable manner.

In sum, people will show up on November 7th at many precincts across America, they will select items on a touch-screen, a lucky few of them will see a paper record of their choices (correctly marked or not) scroll by under a glass, and they will return home having participated in a bit of high-tech political theater that may or may not amount to a bona fide election. If you think that I overstate things just a bit here, then by all means, read on.
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If you're upset and outraged by what you've read here, then probably the best thing I can think of for you to do is get involved with the Election Transparency Project
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The mid-term is probably going to be a complete wreck ... This is what most of us face on November 7th, as we head to the polls in one of the most important mid-term elections in living memory. The stakes have never been higher, and the machinery of democracy has never been in such a state of broken-down chaos.

Brad Friedman is worried about machines from Sequoia Voting Systems:

It seems there's a little yellow button on the back every touch-screen computer made by Sequoia Voting Systems, that allows any voter, or poll worker, or precinct inspector to set the system into "Manual Mode" allowing them to cast as many votes as they want. Concerns about the flaw were first reported some thirty days ago to California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson's office ... [but] McPherson ... denied he was aware of any security issues with Sequoia systems.
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Sequoia's voting machines are perhaps the most widely used in California ... also used in dozens of other states around the country including Florida, Illinois and elsewhere ... all such systems are completely vulnerable to virtually anybody who wishes to cast as many votes as they please.
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"I can do it in 18 seconds," says [Ron Watt, a Tehama County, CA precinct inspector who has been a poll worker in the county for the last fifteen years] "Just push the yellow button, wait 3 seconds and it chimes. Push the yellow button again, wait 3 seconds and it chimes again. Then it's all on the screen prompts. You're asked 'Do you want to enter manual mode?' and you push 'Yes'...And then you're on your way. You can then vote as many times as you want. You won't ever have to stop until someone physically restrains you from voting ... The chime [is] barely audible ... Nobody would ever know."

Ed Felten is worried about Diebold machines in Ohio:

The memory cards that will be used to store votes on Election Day in Cuyahoga County, Ohio were stuck into ordinary laptop computers in September, possibly exposing the county’s election system to a virus infection ... a Princeton evoting study ... showed that the memory cards used in Diebold touchscreen voting systems could carry computer viruses that would infect voting machines and steal votes on the infected machines.
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[A] new video shows a group of election workers sitting at tables, each with a laptop computer. An official explains that these laptops were gathered from around the office, and some are the personal laptops of election workers. Each worker has a laptop and a stack of memory cards, and is inserting the memory cards one by one into the laptop.
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Ordinary laptops are of course vulnerable to computer viruses and other malicious software. Given the number of ordinary laptops in the room, it is reasonably likely that at least one is infected with spyware, a virus, or other malware. This puts at risk the memory cards, and the votes they will record from next week’s election.
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Given the vulnerability of touch screen voting systems, election procedures must be stringent and consistently followed. Safe procedures call for memory cards to be inserted only into computers that are carefully secured and never connected to the Internet. Using ordinary laptop computers, borrowed from offices and homes, to process memory cards is dangerous. The video shows that this practice is not the isolated act of a few election workers, but an official plan put in place by election officials.

LardBrattish:

If you look at the last two presidential elections the amount of fraud is incredible and, indeed, provable (Wikipedia has some nice articles with links to the raw data otherwise try blackboxvoting.org). The scary thing to me (as an outsider) is not the fact that fraud occurs. It's just the fact that the American public seem so utterly apathetic to the fact that democracy has been extinguished.

For example, exit polls are a proven and incredibly accurate way of estimating results. In fact, the only times anywhere in the world ever that they have broken down is when gross electoral fraud has taken place - except in America during the last two presidential elections where the pollsters suddenly and catastrophically failed to conduct an accurate exit poll, but it wasn't due to electoral fraud, oh no.

KNicolson:

Don't emigrate to Japan! Here, you not only have a paper ballot, but you are also required to actually write in the name of the candidate. However, Japan still manages to get a decent turnout, and get the votes counted in a reasonably short span of time, even for local elections which had, in my local town's case last month, about 40 candidates vying for 35 seats.

Knowing the result at 10pm versus knowing it at 2am surely doesn't really make that much of a difference?

Buffer overflow:

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And finally... Would you like to kiss my monkey?

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richij.com.