At a demonstration of the new Sequioa electronic voting system in Nevada -- scheduled for use in the November election -- the brand new voter-verified paper trail feature proved that the machine missed votes.
According to this Wired Magazine story, the machines had been configured to display ballots in English and Spanish. But the Spanish-language ballot missed some votes.
But when the testers switched to a Spanish-language ballot, the paper trail showed no votes cast for two propositions."We did it again and the same thing happened," said Darren Chesin, a consultant to the state Senate elections and reapportionment committee. "The problem was not with the paper trail. The paper trail worked flawlessly, but it caught a mistake in the programming of the touch-screen machine itself. For some reason it would not record or display the votes on the Spanish ballot for these two ballot measures. The only reason we even caught it was because we were looking at the paper trail to verify it (emphasis added)."Nevada is the first state to require electronic voting machines to print a paper ballot that shows voters their choices. These ballots can be used to audit or recount the outcome of an election. The Sequoia machines are scheduled to be used in the November election.
This is a classic example of the need for a voter-verifiable paper trail. If there was no paper trail, the votes might have been recorded incorrectly, and there would be no way to catch the problem.
Posted by alevin at 09:56 AM | Comments (1156)
Austin, TX - The Texas Secretary of State today agreed to indefinitely postpone a meeting of the state's voting examiners following the filing of a lawsuit by the ACLU of Texas and a Texas voter. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is serving as co-counsel in the case. The lawsuit challenged the practice of holding closed meetings in violation of the state's Open Meetings Act. Today, the parties decided to postpone an upcoming voting examiner meeting that had been set for August 18, 2004. As a result of the Secretary of State's decision, the emergency hearing in the case set for Monday, August 16 has been cancelled. Under the agreement, the Secretary of State and voting examiners are required to notify the plaintiffs at least 14 days before any subsequent meeting is held. The underlying lawsuit seeking to open the voting examiner meetings to public scrutiny is not affected and will proceed as planned...
more here
Sunshine Sought for Texas Election Systems Examiners
Lawsuit Attacks Secrecy of Meetings Where E-voting Machines Are Evaluated
Austin, TX. August 10, 2004. The ACLU of Texas and Jon Lebkowsky, a Texas voter, today filed a lawsuit demanding that the meetings of the state’s voting examiners be held in public.
The voting examiners are responsible for studying electronic voting machines and other voting technologies and recommending to the Secretary of State which systems should be certified for use in Texas. In the past few years, the Secretary of State has routinely adopted the recommendations of the panel, yet he has rebuffed efforts by the public to observe the proceedings, claiming that the panel is not subject to Texas’ Open Meetings Act.
Recently, the Texas Safe Voting Coalition obtained videotapes of previous meetings, including one involving Diebold, that suggest a lack of rigor and failure to properly address security and certification compliance issues.
“Texans deserve secure, reliable voting machines, and they deserve to see that the officials charged with certifying those machines are conducting a rigorous evaluation to ensure the systems are secure and effective,” said Adina Levin of theTexas ACLU. “All aspects of the voting process in a democracy should be open and transparent, to give citizens confidence in their vote. The evaluation process should not be hidden behind closed doors."
The case, which will be handled by lead counsel Renea Hicks, seeks a ruling opening up the meetings prior to the upcoming August meeting of the examiners. The lawsuit comes on the heels of a letter filed with the Attorney General in July by Consumers Union that also argued that these closed meetings violate the Texas Open Meetings Act. “The public’s interest in the state’s certification of electronic voting equipment is high,” noted Kathy Mitchell, Open Government Policy Analyst for Consumers Union. “The meetings of the examiners represent the critical point of deliberation during which key issues of interest to the public are discussed and debated.”
“The country is beginning to look under the rug of election certifications and testing processes and the scene is not pretty,” added Cindy Cohn, Legal Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is serving as co-counsel in the case. “Opening up Texas certification processes should send a signal to testing and certification authorities nationwide that they must perform rigorous, public review of the systems that count our votes.
The Complaint is available here:
http://www.safevoting.org/blog/archives/PetitionOpenMeetings.doc
Texas Safe Voting Coalition (including clips of a January, 2004 examiner
meeting):
http://safevoting.org
On May 4, the Texas Voting System Examiners reviewed the first electronic voting system with a voter-verified paper trail. The Accupoll system prints out a ballot for each voter to review, which can be stored in case of audits and recounts.
The Accupoll 2.3.14 was missing a few specifications required in Texas law, so it hasn't yet been certified. It didn't yet have a summary screen, sufficient ease of use on a straight-party ticket, or printing a polling-place summary audit log. It also needed greater security to prevent access to the MySQL database.
Accupoll will be back at the next SOS certification meeting on August 18. We hope that they have addressed the feature and security requirements, to begin to give Texas counties options for a voter-verified paper trail.
The full paper is available on the EFF Website
There are two ways to add a paper ballot to an evoting sytem. The first is to take an optical scan system, and add a computer interface for users to vote. The second is to take Direct Recording Electronic system and add a printer. Here's an overview of solutions on or nearing the market.
Electronic Ballot Markers
Electronic ballot markers can be used to fill out optical scan ballots. These systems look like traditional DREs, but they record votes on paper ballots instead of internal memory. This kind of machine can match all of a DRE’s accessibility features (audio interface, sip/puff input, multiple languages, etc.), and every vote can be verified before submission:
a. Avante’s14 Optical Vote-Trakker15 is a federally qualified, accessible, electronic ballot-marking system. It was the first system qualified to the FEC’s 2002 voting standards, a designation that means, in part, that it produces a 0% error rate even after 1.5 million votes. Certification is pending in several states.
b. ES&S, 16 the world’s largest election equipment manufacturer, is also in the process of attaining federal qualification for an electronic ballot marking system. It will be available later this year.17
DREs with Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trails
DREs equipped with a VVPAT can also provide auditable, accessible voting:
a. Avante’s Vote-Trakker18 is an accessible, VVPAT-equipped DRE that has completed federal testing. It is certified for use in several states and has certifications pending in others.19 This system has been used successfully in five separate elections and the American Council of the Blind lists the Vote-Trakker as an accessible voting system.20 In addition, Jim Dickson of AAPD has called Avante’s VVPAT an “elegant way” to provide a paper audit trail if one is mandated.
b. AccuPol produces a federally qualified, accessible, VVPAT-equipped DRE system. The company is actively pursuing state contracts and expects to have equipment in the field for the November 2004 election. The American Council for the Blind lists AccuPoll as an accessible voting system manufacturer.
c. Sequoia Voting Systems,25 the country’s third-largest election equipment manufacturer, will have a VVPAT-equipped AVC Edge26 on the market by the summer of 2004. The unit will be deployed in every Nevada election jurisdiction in time for the 2004 presidential election.
d. TruVote is in the process of qualifying a VVPAT-equipped DRE. The system also allows voters to verify that their vote was part of the final vote tally via a post-election web interface. The TruVote system should be qualified and available for purchase in the summer of 2004.
As reported by the Miami Daily Business Review
A scathing internal review of the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines used in Miami-Dade and Broward, Fla., counties, written by a Miami-Dade County elections official, has raised fresh doubts about how accurately the electronic machines count the vote.
The review, contained in a June 6, 2003, memo that came to light last month, concludes there is a "serious bug" in the voting machine software that results in votes potentially being lost and voting machines not being accounted for in the voting system's self-generated post-election audit.
In the e-mail memo, Orlando Suarez, division manager of the county's Enterprise Technology Services Department, wrote that the system is "unusable" for auditing, recounting, or certifying an election. Suarez came to his conclusion after analyzing one precinct in a North Miami Beach municipal runoff election held May 21, 2003.
In-depth Nation Article, by a journalist who has been covering the security risks of electronic voting since the 1980s.
Last fall during a public talk on "The Voting Machine War" for advanced computer-science students at Stanford, Dill asked, "Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren't secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. 'Secret.' The software? 'Secret.' What's the cryptography? 'Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines.'... Federal testing procedures? 'Secret'! Results of the tests? 'Secret'! Basically we are required to have blind faith.".
In particular, see the damning evidence of security problems with Diebold in Georgia.
In his front parlor at home in Georgia, Rob Behler told me that just before or just as he took over the Atlanta warehouse for Diebold, some of the voting machines had been sent out to "do demos," and in one southern county "somebody broke in and stole...[nine or] fourteen of the machines and, I think, one of the servers." He says the vote-counting programs in the stolen computers could have been completely reconstructed by reverse engineering and employed to jimmy the election.
"Quality-checking" the AccuVote machines as they arrived from Diebold at a warehouse in Atlanta, Behler and his crew found problems, he says, with "every single one" of them and about a fifth of them were shoved aside as unusable. When Diebold's programmers wanted "patches," that is, changes, inserted into the voting-system software, Behler says, they sent them to him via the company's open, insecure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site in cyberspace. On his own unsecured laptop (resting on his desk as he spoke), Behler made twenty-two or twenty-three of the cards that were used to change the programs in the machines.Posted by alevin at 10:29 AM | Comments (256)