Pull the Plug on E-Voting

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By Bruce O'Dell (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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When it comes to electronic voting, we can't use any of the techniques we apply to securing electronic financial transactions all of which are predicated on the strong proofs of identity and exchange of transaction data with multiple counterparties that are rightfully banned in voting systems. Voting systems are national security systems demanding a much higher standard of protection than mere financial systems.

...yet the behavior of voting software is allowed to go unaudited

Many voting systems provide only an internal electronic audit trail of electronic vote tallies. What foolishness to allow programs to vouch for programs in such a way; as if it is somehow impossible to make two programs lie consistently!

Rep. Rush Holt's HR 550 legislation and its supporters in the academic computer science community are trying to salvage computerized voting by requiring that e-Voting touch-screen equipment always produce a "voter-verified paper audit trail" (VVPAT). This is a kind of receipt which in theory could be audited sometime after an election if the official results were contested. Setting aside the chain of custody problem - as soon as paper leaves the room, it is potentially compromised - when it comes to observing voters actually verifying their paper audit trail, the results are startling.

A 2005 study by the Caltech-MIT Voting Project concluded the following: " no errors were reported in our post-survey data ... ... and over 60 percent of participants indicated that they were not sure if the paper trail contained errors." That's right: in test elections full of deliberately engineered VVPAT errors - including swapped votes and even missing races - no one reported a VVPAT error while voting, a majority were unsure wtether there were any errors or not, and almost a third of the participants continued to insist that there no errors at all even after they were told otherwise by those who switched the votes!

But even that subset of touch screen voting systems with some kind of voter-verified paper trail, and optical scan systems that could in theory be audited ... in practice, are not. Certainly not by the standards of the financial services industry.

HR 550 was regarded as something of a revolutionary breakthrough in voting accountability simply by requiring a random audit of 2% of precincts after the fact. Under the Sarbanes-Oxley financial accountability law passed in the wake of the Enron scandal in 2002, the board of directors of any public company foolish enough to apply the same standard of auditability to their own books now have personal criminal liability for their decisions and so would face prison time for approving such a threadbare scheme.

But apparently when it comes to elections, no standard of protection is too lax.

Voting by computer considered harmful

There was a remarkable article published by the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in 2001, citing work by the Caltech-MIT Voting Project (http://archive.cpsr.net/publications/newsletters/issues/2001/Winter/nilsson.html#1 ) :

"...our best efforts applying computer technology have decreased the accuracy of elections, to the point where the true outcomes of many races are unknowable. Many technologists and technology enthusiasts will read the above words and refuse to believe them. 'There must be some other explanation,' they will say. 'Nothing has been proven,' they will say. 'Future technology will be better,' they will say. But there is no other plausible explanation: new technology may have reduced the cost of elections, and certainly has increased counting speed, but the above results show no statistically significant progress in elections accuracy over people counting paper ballots, one at a time, by hand."

Let me recap: voting by computer may be inherently untrustworthy and in practice poorly crafted, overpriced, prone to breakdowns and wide open to subversion - but at least it's less accurate than counting by hand.

Here's an indictment of the IT profession, and a fine irony: the degree of independent hand-auditing of paper ballot records sufficient to verify the corresponding computerized vote tallies is comparable to the effort required to more accurately count all the ballots by hand in the first place, dispensing with the machines. But until that day arrives, the programs that the voting vendors actually distribute - as opposed to the software they may say they distribute - will continue to determine who takes power after the votes are tallied.

(Continued in Part 2)

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Bruce O'Dell is a self-employed information technology consultant with more than twenty five years experience who applies his broad technical expertise to his work as an election integrity activist. His current consulting practice centers on (more...)

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