NEW

Voting Machines Under Scrutiny
States Face a Jan. 1 Deadline to Meet Reliability Standards

By Brian Bergstein
Associated Press
Wednesday, December 7, 2005

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/06/
AR2005120601518.html

The potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling state officials as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with standards for the machines' reliability.

Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders or other ills.

These are not theoretical problems -- in some states they have led to lost or miscounted votes.

One of the biggest concerns -- the frequent inability of computerized ballots to produce a written receipt of a vote -- has been addressed or is being tackled in most states.

An October report from the Government Accountability Office predicted that steps to improve the reliability of electronic voting "are unlikely to have a significant effect" in the 2006 off-year elections, partly because certification procedures remain a work in progress.

"There's not a lot of precedents in dealing with these electronic systems, so people are slowly figuring out the best way to do this,"
said Thad E. Hall, a political scientist at the University of Utah and co-author of "Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting."

In North Carolina, more stringent requirements -- which include placing the machines' software code in escrow for examination in case of a problem -- have led one supplier, Diebold Inc., to say it will withdraw from the state, where about 20 counties use Diebold voting machines.

A different type of showdown is brewing in California, where Secretary of State Bruce McPherson says he might force makers of the machines to prove their systems can withstand attacks from a hacker. One such test on a Diebold system -- Diebold machines were blamed for voting disruptions in a 2004 California primary -- is planned.

The state has been negotiating details with Harri Hursti, a security expert from Finland who uncovered severe flaws in a Diebold system used in Leon County, Fla. (He demonstrated how vote results could be changed, then made screens flash "Are we having fun yet?")

Similarly, elections officials in Franklin County, Ohio -- where older voting machines gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a preliminary count in 2004 -- recently asked computer experts to test newly purchased touch-screen voting machines from Election Systems and Software Inc.

Such designated hack attempts might be a flawed approach, because a failure proves only that a particular hacker could not break into a machine under certain conditions. That is not the same as opening things up to a broader group of researchers, as software developers sometimes do. Many critics of touch-screen election computers argue that the software should be publicly examined to make sure vote tampering could not occur.

A McPherson spokeswoman said the hacking test would be one of many factors in deciding whether to approve the voting machines. McPherson has released a 10-point plan for certification efforts, including a software code escrow system.

The scrutiny is likely to make California miss a Jan. 1 deadline set under the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002.

That law was aimed at phasing out the punch-card ballots and other old-fashioned systems that proved problematic in 2000. It requires states to improve disability access at polling places in addition to standardizing electronic voting systems.

A report by Election Data Services Inc., a political consulting firm, for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission determined that 23 percent of American voters used electronic ballots in 2004, a 12 percent increase over 2000.

Since then, largely because of warnings from computer security experts and grass-roots activism, many states have began requiring the machines to produce paper receipts that voters can examine. At least 25 states have such rules and 14 more have requirements pending, according to the Verified Voting Foundation.

"There's a long way to go -- making our elections truly trustworthy in this country is a multifaceted problem," said David L. Dill, a Stanford University computer scientist and founder of the foundation. But he added that he expected a "much better situation in 2006" and noted that improving electronic voting has become "a delightfully nonpartisan issue."

Manufacturers insist that their voting machines are reliable and that critics have made too much of isolated problems.

"Anytime there's an issue that happens with a particular voting system, all vendors are painted with the same broad brush," said Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman for Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. "There are differences from product to product. You need to look at the track record of particular companies."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
 

LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS RESCINDS SUPPORT FOR PAPERLESS VOTING MACHINES
06.15.04

Washington, DC - The League of Women Voters rescinded its support of paperless voting machines today after hundreds of angry members voiced concern that paper ballots were the only way to safeguard elections from fraud, hackers or computer malfunctions. About 800 delegates who attended the nonpartisan league's biennial convention in Washington voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that supports "voting systems and procedures that are secure, accurate, recountable and accessible."

"There is a grassroots groundswell across the country to make sure our elections are auditable this November. The decision by the League of Women Voters is just another sign of its growing strength," said Rep. Rush Holt.

Rep. Rush Holt is the author of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, H.R. 2239, which would require paper audit trails on electronic voting machines prior to the November 2004 election. The bill has more than 140 bipartisan cosponsors in the U.S. House
of Representatives.

News from Representative Rush Holt
12th District, New Jersey
www.house.gov/rholt

For Immediate Release 
Contact: Jim Kapsis
202-225-5801

Lost E-Votes Could Flip Napa Race
3.12.04

By Kim Zetter

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,62655,00.html

Napa County in Northern California said on Friday that electronic voting machines used in the March presidential primary failed to record votes on some of its paper ballots, which will force the county to re-scan over 11,000 ballots and possibly change the outcome of some close local races.

The glitch is the latest in a string of problems with the new generation of electronic voting machines being rolled out across the United States. Critics of the machines say they are inaccurate or susceptible to tampering, and can't be trusted in this year's presidential elections.

The problem occurred with optical scan machines manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, which failed to record voters' marks off of paper ballots. The county used the company's Optech system for processing paper absentee ballots. More....

Super Tuesday Electronic Voting Problems
03.02.04  
 
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Electronic voting made its debut in cities and towns from Maryland to California on Tuesday as election officials beefed up security for the record number of voters expected to cast E-ballots for the first time.

Scattered technical problems were reported in the early hours as voters in 10 states, including California, New York and Ohio, went to the Super Tuesday polls to choose a Democratic presidential nominee and decide primary contests for congressional and state races.

Advocates of electronic voting say paperless ballots save money and eliminate problems common to old systems. But the technology brings a new breed of security concerns, like software errors and hackers that could make the results unreliable. More...

The subject is not hypothetical. Millions of voters will cast ballots on electronic machines today in the biggest test so far of the technology. To address security concerns, researchers are proposing new ways of voting that do not require voter trust in people or software. More...

Officials challenge Wexler's suit for state paper ballots
02.07.04

By Kathy Bushouse
The Sun-Sentinel

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler's lawsuit to require paper ballots for the state's voting machines should be dismissed or transferred out of Palm Beach County, attorneys for the county elections supervisor and Florida secretary of state argued Friday. More...(external link to Sun Sentinel).

States May Soon Get $2.3B for Elections 
2.17.04

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A long-awaited $2.3 billion in federal funds should be flowing to states by mid-May to help buy new voting-booth equipment and make other election improvements, the head of an electoral reform commission says. More.... (external link to San Jose Mercury News)

Military drops project for voting via Internet 
02.06.04
REUTERS

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon said Thursday it had scrapped its program to allow U.S. troops and other Americans overseas to vote through the Internet because the system was so vulnerable to computer hackers it could cast doubt on the election results.
 
The Pentagon heeded the advice of cybersecurity experts who urged in a Jan. 21 report that the program be abandoned because it was impossible to create a voting system with current personal computers and the Internet that would stop hackers or terrorists from tampering with election results. bvgggggggggg

Technical Security Assessment of Electronic Voting Systems
The Ohio Secretary of State hired a consulting firm to review the security (or lack of) of the electronic voting systems under consideration for use in the state. The results of that study showed the systems to be highly vulnerable to possible intrusion and error. You can read or download that study by clicking here (to download, right click and choose Save Target As).

How to Hack an Election
January 31, 2004
© New York Times

Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails.

When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election. More...

New Hampshire: N.H. Among Few Using Paper in Vote Records
01.28.04

By RACHEL KONRAD AP Technology Writer
January 28, 2004, 6:19 PM EST

The technology troubles that could bedevil elections this year in California, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere were absent in New Hampshire this week. That's because it is among the few states that require a paper record for every ballot cast.

New Hampshire's relatively low-tech system -- adopted after disasters with both antiquated punch cards and touch-screen computers -- could become a nationwide model as scrutiny over electronic voting grows. More....

Report Says Internet Voting System Is Too Insecure to Use
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
New York Times
01.21.04

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

The system, Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, was developed with financing from the Department of Defense and will first be used in this year's primaries and general election.

The authors of the new report noted that computer security experts had already voiced increasingly strong warnings about the reliability of electronic voting systems, but they said the new voting program, which allows people overseas to vote from their personal computers over the Internet, raised the ante on such systems' risks.

The system, they wrote, "has numerous other fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks, any one of which could be catastrophic." Any system for voting over the Internet with common personal computers, they noted, would suffer from the same risks.

The trojans, viruses and other attacks that complicate modern life and allow such crimes as online snooping and identity theft could enable hackers to disrupt or even alter the course of elections, the report concluded. Such attacks "could have a devastating effect on public confidence in elections," the report's authors wrote, and so "the best course to take is not to field the SERVE system at all." More.... or click here for full article on NYTimes site.

OHIO: Counties shun new voting machines
01.20.04

Mark Naymik and Julie Carr Smyth
Plain Dealer Reporters

A group of Ohio's largest counties, including Cuyahoga, refused Thursday to meet a state deadline for selecting new voting machines until Secretary of State Ken Blackwell can guarantee that the machines are secure. At the same time, more than half the counties that were required to select a voting-machine maker chose the company whose security problems have gained it the most scrutiny nationally: Diebold Election Systems. The Canton-based company has landed more than $31 million in contracts statewide. The large counties protesting - including Democrat-dominated Cuyahoga, Republican-heavy Hamilton, and Montgomery - said too many security and cost-related questions remain about the new systems. More....

New York Times Editorial: Fixing Democracy
1.18.04

The morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines.

This is no way to run a democracy. 

Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the rest of the world. But the key principle behind it, that our leaders govern with the consent of the governed, requires a process that accurately translates the people's votes into political power. Too often, the system falls short. Throughout this presidential election year, we will be taking a close look at the mechanics of our democracy and highlighting aspects that cry out for reform. Among the key issues:

Voting Technology An accurate count of the votes cast is the sine qua non of a democracy, but one that continues to elude us. As now-discredited punch-card machines are being abandoned, there has been a shift to electronic voting machines with serious reliability problems of their own. Many critics, including computer scientists, have been sounding the alarm: through the efforts of a hacker on the outside or a malicious programmer on the inside, or through purely technical errors, these machines could misreport the votes cast.

They are right to be concerned. There is a fast-growing list of elections in which electronic machines have demonstrably failed, or produced dubious but uncheckable results. One of the most recent occurred, fittingly enough, in Palm Beach and Broward Counties in Florida just this month. Touch-screen machines reported 137 blank ballots in a special election for a state House seat where the margin of victory was 12 votes. The second-place finisher charged that faulty machines might have cost him the election. "People do not go to the polls in a one-issue election and not vote," he said. But since the machines produce no paper record, there was no way to check. It is little wonder that last month, Fortune magazine named paperless voting its "worst technology" of 2003.

To address these concerns, electronic voting machines should produce a paper trail — hard-copy receipts that voters can check to ensure that their vote was accurately reported, and that can later be used in a recount. California recently took the lead on this issue, mandating paper trails from its machines by July 2006. A bill introduced by Representative Rush Holt would do the same nationally. Congress should make every effort to put paper trails in place by this fall.  More....

CALIFORNIA: County OKs paper ballot backup for Diebold system
1.14.04

By GREG MOBERLY, Times-Herald staff writer

FLORIDA: Push for paper ballots increases
01.14.04

By George Bennett and Deana Poole, Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 14, 2004

WEST PALM BEACH -- Pointing to last week's contested special election and fearing a presidential meltdown in November, Palm Beach County commissioners Tuesday called on the state to require a ballot-by-ballot paper record of votes cast on electronic voting machines.

"You are never going to have an election that can be counted on without a paper trail," said Commissioner Burt Aaronson.

Aaronson wants ballot printers in place in time for the November elections -- a time frame that legislators, elections officials and voting machine manufacturers call questionable. California's secretary of state recently ordered all the state's touch screens to be outfitted with printers, but not until the 2006 elections. More... (link to Palm Beach Post online).

FLORIDA: 2004's first election stirs ghosts of past
1.9.04

A special state House election hinges on a slim margin. 
Officials hash it out as a presidential election looms.

An automatic recount Thursday did not change the outcome of a special election for House District 91 in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Ellyn Bogdanoff still holds a 12-vote lead over Oliver Parker. But Bogdanoff still has not been declared the winner, and Parker's camp claims some votes were not counted.

A total of 134 Broward voters who went to the polls Tuesday were not recorded as voting for any of seven Republicans on the ballot. The undervotes represent 1.3 percent of the more than 10,000 Broward residents who voted. More.... (link to St. Petersburg Times article)

OHIO: Electronic voting delayed
By TOM GIAMBRONI
1.9.04

LISBON, OHIO — Electronic voting probably won’t be coming to the county until 2005 at the earliest. Madhu Singh, a field representative for Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, said her boss sought and received a federal waiver extending the deadline for implementation of statewide electronic voting.

When Congress passed a new voting law following the Florida presidential election debacle in 2000, states were required to replace voting systems with an electronic voting system by the 2004 presidential election.

Blackwell had been holding off seeking a deadline extension in the hope Ohio would be prepared to make the switch by either the 2004 primary or general election. Meeting the deadline became impossible because of delays, including concerns raised about the security of the electronic systems offered by the four companies selected by Blackwell. More.... (link to Morning Journal article).

ORLANDO, Fla. - (KRT) - Ten months before the next presidential vote, the federal commission created to help states avoid another Florida-style ballot fiasco still has no office or phone lines.

Millions of voters in cities such as Chicago and St. Louis will still have to guard against dangling chads - four years after punch-card ballots helped turn the 2000 election into a U.S. Supreme Court case.

Across the country, sweeping election reforms pledged in the wake of the Florida mess remain unfulfilled. More….

Hacker breaks into electronic voting firm site
12.31.03

Story by Linda Rosencrance 

DECEMBER 31, 2003 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - The CEO of VoteHere Inc., a developer of secure electronic voting technology confirmed yesterday that a hacker broke into its corporate network in October and accessed internal documents. 
Jim Adler, CEO of the Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, said the break-in may be related to a recent firestorm of concern over the security of online voting. More.... (link to Computerworld article).

12.22.03
Fortune Magazine Names Winners and Losers of 2003
Paperless Voting Named Worst Technology

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,558787,00.html

12.16.03
Washington State

Electronic Voting Investigator Bev Harris to Reveal Newly Discovered Potential Electronic Voting Security Breaches at Seattle News Conference 

On December 16th
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/03/12/ale03003.html

Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting" and Andy Stephenson, a Democratic candidate for Washington State Secretary of State, have uncovered new holes in the electoral system in King County (Seattle) and in as many as 14 additional states.

These security breaches affect both the optical scan systems (fill-in-the-dot or draw-the-line) and touch screen voting systems, and may also indicate significant security problems with absentee voting procedures.

12.16.03
Washington State

On Tuesday, Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed and several county election administrators announced proposed legislation that will require electronic voting machines in Washington to offer a paper audit trail.

"As Secretary of State and an elections administrator for more than 20 years, my priority is voter confidence in the election process," said Reed. "If this means adding another redundancy to new voting systems, such as a paper audit trail, you'd better believe I will pursue that option."

http://www.secstate.wa.gov/office/news.aspx?news_id=227

12.16.03
AP Report in Tuesday Herald Tribune

At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible for voting machine software.

Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold Inc., one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions, and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031216/APN/312161067

Los Angeles Times
12.12.03
The Los Angeles Times devoted its primary editorial to the subject of fair voting. Warning that "It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting," the article includes a strong endorsement of H.R. 2239: "Legislators should begin by passing a bill by Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) that would require the new machines to provide a paper receipt to each voter." 

Congressional Watch
12.09.03

On December 9, Senator Bob Graham introduced a companion bill into the Senate. The bill, S.1980, is identical to H.R. 2239 in both title and text. Contrary to what his initial press release stated, his office tells stated the bill has been referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration. http://www.senate.gov/~graham/pr120903.html

Also on December 9, Senator Hillary Clinton introduced a bill, S.1986. This bill is much different from the Holt bill, and not as strict. You can read the text of the bill here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.1986: (be sure to include the final colon in the URL).

And on December 11, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) announced that she will introduce a companion bill to H.R.2239. http://boxer.senate.gov/newsroom/200312/20031211_vot.html

As of this writing, we have no details on the bill, but her announcement suggests that it will be very similar to H.R. 2239.

New York Times
12.08.03
In its December 8 editorial dedicated to the voting issue, the New York Times referred to Holt's bill and ended with this unequivocal statement: "Too many elections teeter on a few hundred votes, and candidates rightly expect human beings to be able to double-check the results. America's election apparatus needs to move firmly and quickly into the computer age. But the public must feel secure that each vote is really counted. At this stage, a voter-verified paper trail offers the public that necessary security."

Arkansas Activists Help Move Toward VVPT
In his press release, Secretary of State Charlie Daniels said, "Uncertainty about funding and standards gives me some pause at this point about moving forward with our May deadline." While this language does not speak directly to the concerns and efforts of the voting activists, Arkansas' HAVA waiver is the first requested by a southern state - a great success in the movement toward verified voting.

California Audits Diebold Machines
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ordered an audit of the Diebold machines in all California's counties.

More on California Audits
Results of audit may be turned over to State's Attorney General.