Most computer scientists have long viewed Diebold as the poster child for all that is wrong with touch screen voting machines. But we never imagined that Diebold would be as irresponsible and incompetent as they have turned out to be.
Recently, computer security expert Harri Hursti revealed serious security vulnerabilities in Diebold's software. According to Michael Shamos, a computer scientist and voting system examiner in Pennsylvania, "It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system."
Even more shockingly, we learned recently that Diebold and the State of Maryland had been aware of these vulnerabilities for at least two years. They were documented in analysis, commissioned by Maryland and conducted by RABA Technologies, published in January 2004. For over two years, Diebold has chosen not to fix the security holes, and Maryland has chosen not to alert other states or national officials about these problems.
Basically, Diebold included a "back door" in its software, allowing anyone to change or modify the software. There are no technical safeguards in place to ensure that only authorized people can make changes.
A malicious individual with access to a voting machine could rig the software without being detected. Worse yet, if the attacker rigged the machine used to compute the totals for some precinct, he or she could alter the results of that precinct. The only fix the RABA authors suggested was to warn people that manipulating an election is against the law.
Typically, modern voting machines are delivered several days before an election and stored in people's homes or in insecure polling stations. A wide variety of poll workers, shippers, technicians, and others who have access to these voting machines could rig the software. Such software alterations could be difficult to impossible to detect.
Diebold spokesman David Bear admitted to the New York Times that the back door was inserted intentionally so that election officials would be able to update their systems easily. Bear justified Diebold's actions by saying, "For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software... I don't believe these evil elections people exist."
While Diebold's confidence in election officials is heartwarming, Diebold has placed election officials in an awkward position, with no defense against disgruntled candidates or voters questioning the results of an election. The situation is even worse for those states and localities using Diebold touch-screen machines that have no voter-verified paper records to recount.
Diebold voting machines have been certified to be in compliance with 2002 Voting System Standards, as required by the Help America Vote Act. These standards prohibit software features that raise any doubt "that the software tested during the qualification process remains unchanged and retains its integrity." We must ask, how did software containing such an outrageous violation come to be certified, and what other flaws, yet to be uncovered, lurk in other certified systems?
There have been many significant problems - some resulting in lost votes - involving paperless voting machines produced by other vendors. Recognizing the intrinsic risks of paperless voting machines, the Association for Computing Machinery issued a statement saying that each voter should be able "to inspect a physical (e.g., paper) record to verify that his or her vote has been accurately cast and to serve as an independent check on the result." Without voter-verified paper records of all the votes, and without routine spot audits of these records, no currently available voting system can be trusted. With such records, even when machines do not function correctly, each voter can make sure that his or her vote has been correctly recorded on paper.
Our democracy depends on our having secure, reliable, and accurate elections.
David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the founder of VerifiedVoting.org. Doug Jones is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Iowa. Barbara Simons is retired from IBM Research and a former ACM President. Jones and Simons are writing a book on voting machines to be published by PoliPoint Press.
First, I would like to personally thank all of the people who have been working so hard on this issue, and especially Bobby Kennedy,Jr, who wrote the article for Rolling Stone..
But we still have a huge problem. Most states have done nothing about fixing anything. We have, conceivably, the most important election in my 57 years coming up in November.
Here is the question that keep me up nights: What are we going to do, if it looks like the Rethugs have done it again.
I cannot imagine a more serious civil crime than election tampering in a Democracy. We cannot just sit here and do nothing, waiting for the Democrats to cry foul. By the time they have all of the hard evidence they think they need to raise questions about this election, we will be busy with 2008. That's how it works.
I believe that it is up to the people. We can either draw a line in the sand now, and let it be known that we will not tolarate anymore election tampering, if we have to bring this country to a stand still, for days or weeks on end.
Or we can live in a twisted, plutocratiic Theocracy of some kind. Or we can pack up and move to a Democracy, because we do not have one here, now.
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wintefire6 (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 86 comments)
on Sunday, July 23, 2006 at 3:38:13 PM
I agree with you that it's urgent to wake people up. I just got an email from someone to whom I had sent a copy of "Invisible Ballots". He mentioned that he had learned a lot from it. When I pressed him about spreading the word, his response was that everyone he knew is apathetic. That may be a very accurate reflection; however, I agree with you completely. If we don't wake up from our apathy, we will find ourselves too late out of the gate to save the democracy we claim to hold so dear. This will not be an easy fight. But it has to start with people emerging from their stupor and seeing what is at stake. After that, we must all do what we can to spread the word, from the bottom up, demanding change. Nothing else will do. It's as simple as that.
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Joan Brunwasser (118 articles, 3292 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 565 comments)
on Sunday, July 23, 2006 at 8:18:31 PM
"If voting could change things - they'd make it illegal."
Since the day we're born we're told to get a receipt for everything. You buy a stick a gum, you get a receipt. Yet, for the most fundamental aspect of democracy to survive we're suppose to simply trust humane nature, let alone put aside whatever glitches technology can throw our way.
The fact that the American public simply accepts non-paper trail voting confirms that we may be the most gullible, naive and foolish of peoples on this planet.
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Michael DiBari (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments)
on Monday, July 24, 2006 at 12:29:50 PM
Voting does not matter. Neither does the 1st Amendment which is violated when the gov't detains peaceful protestors and pressures Amazon to drop the book "America Deceived" by E.A. Blayre III. The 4th Amendment is gutted as the administration wire-taps phones without a warrant. The entire Constitution is ignored as the gov't starts 2 illegals wars based on lies and a false flag operation known as 9/11.
Final link (before Google Books caves to pressure):
America Deceived - Book
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Lorring II (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 85 comments)
on Monday, July 24, 2006 at 4:17:15 PM
Quote from article, *The Diebold Bombsell* :
*Without voter-verified paper records
of all the votes, and without routine spot audits of these records, no
currently available voting system can be trusted. With such records,
even when machines do not function correctly, each voter can make sure
that his or her vote has been correctly recorded on paper.*
So my vote was correctly recorded on paper -- why should that make me feel secure? Would someone please tell me why everyone is fixating on *voter-verified paper receipts* and believing that as long as we have that, and routine sample audits, we can relax and feel assured that our vote results are reliable? It seems to me that is FALSE SECURITY. Yes, we need paper receipts, but it seems to me that our vote results are still far from safe or reliable until we look beyond paper receipts and start focusing laser-like attention on the SECURITY OF THE MEMORY CARDS which TABULATE the votes in the voting machines (both the DRE machines AND the optical scanners which tabulate paper ballots). [Hari Hursti was able to gain access to the memory card in an OPTICAL SCANNER, and within a few minutes I believe he was able to introduce programming code which manipulated the VOTE TABULATION DATA for the entire precinct.] The biggest vulnerability for those memory cards is during the period leading up to the opening of the polls on election day, and the period following the close of the polls. You can have all the paper receipts and poll watchers you want on Election Day itself and it won't do anything to safeguard the period of real vulnerability for the memory cards.
We need strict chain of command security controls for the life time of every memory card from the day it is delivered to the Registrar's office to the point when its tabulation results are fed into the central tabulator, and citizens groups need to be demanding access to those security log books to ensure that those security measures are being strictly enforced. In cases where security lapses are found, we need to demand a full recount of the votes from that particular machine, rather than an audit of randomly selected precincts.
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my2cents (0 articles, 5 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 30 comments)
on Tuesday, August 1, 2006 at 2:06:32 PM
