For twelve years I was in charge of Internet services at a truly major Federal agency noted largely for its unsurpassed contributions to high technology in the civilian realm. Furthermore, I was also in charge of information technology security for the most prominent office in that agency, one that was a particularly juicy target for hackers. I have traveled the country giving speeches on methods to prevent penetration by hackers and malicious computer code in heterogenous computing environments, and in the steps that must be taken to recover when such penetration has occurred. NOBODY ever penetrated any computer under my charge at any time during my tenure.
When I tell you the following you can take as the genuine truth: There is NO POSSIBLE WAY UNDER THE SUN to "fix" voting machines to ensure their accuracy or their immunity from penetration from a party seeking personal gain. They are ALL, regardless of what "generation" they are, past, present or future, utterly unfixable in this context, whether or not they contain paper trails, and whether they're used merely to mark ballots or cast votes or are used to tabulate votes cast by other means (as with optical scanners). Every computer ever built is vulnerable to attack, and there is no possible way to render any computer genuinely invulnerable.
Every entity that has its hands on any kind of voting or vote counting device at any point in its construction, programming, or implementation, has a political aspect that will be served by one or another candidate in any given race, whether the entity is corporate or governmental in nature. Whether the mechanism or code is proprietary or open source, secret or public, sealed or unsealed, and regardless of any testing that might take place, at some points in the process there will be opportunities -- in fact, multiple opportunities -- to tamper with the mechanical, electronic or programming internals in a way as to alter the output from those devices in ways that are difficult or even impossible to detect, and that could change the apparent outcome of our elections.
It is because of my intimate familiarity with computers and computer security that I am so adamant in my opposition to computerized voting and vote counting. It is certainly not from any "dislike" of computers. I LOVE them and continue to make my living from my knowledge of them.
If we wish to rebuild confidence in our elections and any genuine integrity in our balloting processes, we must recognize that the stakes in our election outcomes are simply too high to introduce any potential for tampering at any point in the process -- any such vulnerability will CERTAINLY be exploited because of the truly enormous temptations that such high stakes represent. It is literally IMPOSSIBLE to provide any kind of integrity in ballot casting and vote counting unless the voter can actually SEE and fully understand for whom his or her ballot has ACTUALLY been cast, and those ballots are counted in the presence of bipartisan witnesses.
This goal can ONLY be achieved by PAPER ballots, manually marked and manually tabulated. NO OTHER SOLUTION IS OR CAN EVER BE ACCEPTABLE if the goal is to provide integrity in our balloting and in the counting of our votes. ANY device inserted between a voter and the tabulation of his or her vote introduces vulnerabilities to the system and diminishes confidence in the integrity of our elections.
Here is ACM’s SRI Prof. Peter Neumann’s view of this:
“Even if you can look at the source code, you can’t guarantee that there’s not a Trojan horse embedded somewhere in the code. Any self-respecting system programmer can hack the innards of the system to defeat encryption techniques or any password protection, or anything like that. All this stuff is trivial to break, for the most part. In most computer systems out there, it is child’s play. Given the fact that the underlying systems are so penetrable, it is relatively easy to fudge data-for example, to start out with three thousand votes for one guy and zero for the other before the counting even starts, even though the counter shows zero. Essentially a Trojan horse in the coding. I can do it in the operating system. I can do it in the application program. Or I can do it in the compiler. I can rig it so that all test decks work perfectly well….”
Peter G. Neumann Principal Scientist SRI International Computer Science Laboratory ...Doctorates from Harvard and Darmstadt....He is concerned with computer systems and networks, trustworthiness/dependability, high assurance, security, reliability, urvivability, safety, and many risks-related issues such as voting-system integrity, crypto policy, social implications, and human needs including privacy. He moderates the ACM Risks Forum, edits CACM's monthly Inside Risks column, chairs the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, and chairs the National Committee for Voting Integrity. He created ACM SIGSOFT's Software Engineering Notes in 1976, was its editor for 19 years, and still contributes the RISKS section. He has participated in four studies for the National Academies of Science: Multilevel Data Management Security (1982), Computers at Risks (1991), Cryptography's Role in Security the Information Society (1996), and Improving Cybersecurity for the 21st Century: ationalizing the Agenda (2007). Etc etc
But polticians bed down with makers and bent election officials, ...anything to keep these machines in use . This stinks of fraud, of a direct assault on democracy HCPB, YES!
by
abacus (2 articles, 2 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 57 comments)
on Tuesday, August 7, 2007 at 11:56:16 PM
We keep tossing those babies out with the bathwater. It’s not the technology. It’s the people that program them, the tycoons that sell a defective/unfinished product, and the election officials that accept them without the rigorous quality control testing to ensure a working product. Errors will occur…technology just speeds up the process and mega-increases the volume. Our procedures and laws need to be brought inline with technology.
Paper ballots offer the means to verify and recount votes. Unfortunately, these and other paper trails will not ensure one-voter-one-vote-every-time with state-of-the-art independent, stand-alone vote counting machines. Optical ballot scanners are just as suspect as touch screens. Until we implement high-bar stringent guidelines for voting machine providers and elections officials to uphold, until we fix out election laws to protect us from machine and human error, and human interpretation our election process will continue to be broken.
Lani Massey Brown, A MARGIN OF ERROR: BALLOTS OF STRAW, a novel for non-techies with a glimpse at the inside of a stolen election
by
Lani Massey Brown (9 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 5 comments)
on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 11:44:54 AM
Lani, yes, honest errors will occur no matter what we do. Fraud is the problem. Do you get it?
Machines can be rigged. Large groups of bipartisan citizens keep each other in check.
We need transparent, verifiable procedures and paper ballots. We need to SLOW down. What's the big deal if it takes several days, or even weeks to count and recount if necessary? There is nothing we do that is more important than a fair election result!!!!
This is one baby that needs throwing out, baby -- techno-voting!
Thanks, Woody, for saying what common sense tells us all. I hope you're talking to our legislators......
