Ohio Study Confirms Voting Systems Vulnerabilities 91
bratgitarre writes "A comprehensive study of electronic voting systems (PDF) by vendors ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Premier (formerly Diebold) found that 'all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election'. In particular, they note all systems provide insufficiently protection against threats from election insiders, do not follow well-known security practices, and have 'deeply flawed software maintenance' practices." Some of these machines are the ones California testers found fault with last week.
Right... "election insiders"... (Score:1, Interesting)
Whether you set up the process with electronic voting or you use old fashioned paper slips, someone somewhere can either cause votes to disappear or have extra votes sent to a certain candidate. It doesn't matter what system is in place.
Even with the most secure and trustworthy electronic voting booth, you're still going to lose all the data if, say, a giant meteor came crashing down on it, crushing it. Maybe something not quite as heavy is needed.. An "out of control" truck, perhaps?
Wrong! (Score:5, Interesting)
It is perfectly possible to make pencil-and-paper elections secure against the malpractices you suggest, as well as many others that you haven't thought of but the election designers certainly have!
Even if the entire system were corrupt, in terms of every single person involved in running the election being involved in a conspiracy, there's no way they could hide what they're doing from observers.
Now, in civilised parts of the world people don't always make use of all their observation opportunities. For example, in the UK the candidate can watch the ballot box being sealed, make a note of the number on the seal, and check that the same seal is still on the box when it is opened later at the counting hall. But we don't bother - we trust the officials, and we've been working for something like 17 hours with another 4 or 5 to go so we take the opportunity to have something to eat whilst the ballot boxes are being shifted around. But, if there were any suspicion that the election officials tampered with the boxes in their cars, we could do this check.
Oh, and as we all said goodbye to each other when leaving Kosovo the first time we were all calling out "bye, see you in Florida!", including the Americans.
Could learn from Venezuela (Score:3, Interesting)
We have the technology to do this right.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Trillions of dollars are transfered via electronic means, perhaps even more than that if you define a time line.
The only difference here is the anonymity of the voter, who they voted for. Where security dealing with verifying a qualified voter before they vote and that they only vote once, should be no more an issue as when it was when it was all paper.
The fact that this electronic voting problem exist at all, but also full scope across all machines tested really does identify just how manipulative corrupt the political system really is.
Re:Computers just aren't ready (Score:3, Interesting)
It reminds me of the old Hungarian joke from the times of Communism. Back then, Hungary brought up something stunningly progressive for elections: Two candidates. Sure, both from the communist party, but there were actually two candidates on the list. Yes, that was considered a huge leap forwards in terms of democracy.
The joke runs like this: A man comes into a shop selling vases. There has always been one rather shabby red vase on display, now there are two shabby red vases on display. He asks for a vase and instead of getting a shabby red vase handed the salesperson proudly gestures to the two vases. "But they're identical! And identically crappy!" the customer exclaims. "Yes", says the shop owner, "But you have the free choice!"
This is how I feel about US elections these days.
Various frauds ... (Score:4, Interesting)
What would the impact be of a carbomb going off in one of the vehicles transporting the ballots? If a district were known to be heavily in favor of a certain candidate, wouldn't the destruction of those ballots negate their votes?
Depends.
Round here, in a local election there are three ballot boxes for my ward, and they are probably transported to the count in two cars. The loss of any one of those boxes would clearly invalidate the election. Whether the election would have be run again in the entire ward, or just in the area(s) for the lost box(es) I don't know, but I think "the entire ward" would be a good guess.
For a parliamentary election, there are around forty ballot boxes for this constituency. If one box were lost, and that box held, say, 1,500 ballots, and the count of the remaining boxes gave someone a majority of, say, 4,000, then the result would be clear without that box. Otherwise I expect that again the entire election would be re-run.
(A car transporting me to a polling station, of which I was in charge, in Kosovo broke down. I finished the journey sitting in the back of the van that our armed guard was driving. A novel experience for a Brit - most of us can go through life never seeing a real live gun, and having one a few way away from you is a bit weird.)
Publicity for false election day
Dunno about the American South, but round here that's something I'm pretty sure would go through the courts, with a re-run of the election a possible outcome.
Company pressure
There's no way you can have an "informant watching the polls" in a propery run election. Everybody in the polling station needs to have a good excuse
Now, this sort of buying / forcing votes is possible with postal votes - your crooked employer could lean on his employees to request postal votes and then hand over the ballot papers. There isn't an answer to this, which is why we (my party) really don't like postal votes very much, other than for the traditional good reasons (housebound etc).
(This sort of employer pressure was thought to be widespread in the Ukraine election that was re-run because of the various complaints. I went to the Boxing Day re-run (a novel way to spend Christmas away from my family) and we were told that the employers hadn't applied any pressure the second time round, basically everybody involved had decided to stop trying to cheat and to hold a clean election.)
if we can't actually verify that each vote is registered
Do you mean voters who don't make it onto the electoral register? Yes, that's part of the wider system rather than polling day security. There's two theories about natural safeguards here:
(a) candidates will make efforts to get everybody onto the register
(b) actually it probably doesn't matter that much, as someone who can't be bothered to get onto the register is quite likely also somebody who can't be bothered to vote, so who cares.
And there are plenty more ways of gaming elections you haven't thought up yet
Re:With all due respect... this is news? (Score:4, Interesting)
In other words, there's a reason why NH's system is so good. Heck, I love a state government where a man I'd gotten to know as an elevator operator was elected to the state House.
Re:Computers just aren't ready (Score:4, Interesting)
Vote for your third party candidate as #1 then you can avoid "wasting" your vote by ranking the others. If your #1 choice doesn't make it, then at least you still have a say in the remaining candidates.
Most importantly, everyone can see how many people voted for your third party, since nobody will vote for a more popular party as #1 thinking it would be wasted.
=Smidge=