Election Fraud? In America? Shurely Not

Here in Chicago people don’t just stay politically active after they die – they multiply. But ya gotta admit, the Diebold guy would fit right in – crooked, (brain-)dead, and probably multiples like other bacteria…

Oddly enough, this would not be a problem if we did away with the secret ballot. Machine-based fraud would be virtually impossible in an open vote. Of course, whether other potential forms of corruption are worse is a reasonable question. I’m working on a paper that touches on this very subject: http://home.gwu.edu/~mdtownes/secretballot.doc

I really don’t mind if the votes of the dead are counted. I do, however, object when dead people are allowed to vote multiple times in the same election. That’s a line, I think, that shouldn’t be crossed lest our democratic system be seriously compromised…just saying…

Optical scan. It’s got the best of both worlds; Machine readable, and filled in by hand, and a scanner kicks it back out when you try to drop it in the box, if you double voted.

Honestly, I have a hard time coming up with any good reason for going with computer based voting machines, except to make fraud easier. Well, maybe kickbacks…

He may or may not be stupid; most likely he is not. He’s just doing his job.

Many are called but few chosen. Nah, this one probably doesn’t fit here.

Anyway, you don’t know how much the guy is being paid for this. Few minutes of shame once in a while for a few hundred Gs – not a bad deal; all his friends are envious.

Hey, John Lott says that Diebold machines are OK. Isn’t that good enough for you?

Just think of how bad Kerry would have lost if his minions hadn’t hacked the machines to increase his vote count!

>Plenty of countries that still use hand-counted
>ink-and-paper ballots manage to do a full count the
>same day the vote is taken.

Yeah, and most of them have one, maybe two races on the ballot – parliament and local council. We have anywhere from 10-50 depending on the location and election cycle. Now whether we gain moving from optical scan (scan-tron, for the recently schooled) to pure electronic, I doubt.

I don’t know if it’s better than pen and paper, but open source voting has got to be better (and cheaper) than Diebold.

“India has been using electronic voting machines for a few election cycles now, and nobody seems be complaining. why can’t the United States—arguably the most technically astute nation—can’t make it work?”

We’ve been a democracy for a lot longer. You’d think that would be a good thing, but it just means that we’ve had more time for cheating to get really organized and entrenched.

If you have more people voting, you have more people available to help count as well, and the costs are shared over more people…size doesn’t really impact the speed or cost of voting, only complexity of the system you use, and how often you vote would really cause a shift towards making an electronic system more necessary.

I guarantee you corruption is way worse in India than it is in the U.S.

Really? What are you offerring by way of guarantee and what do you offer as proof of this assertion?

Open the systems up and run them on Free Software.

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org

I can’t say categorically whether India’s electoral system is more corrupt than that of the US (in fact, I feel the Electoral Commission is one of the arms of the administration that Indians should be proud of – they do their job under very difficult circumstances and the folks who win are usually the ones people voted for, a useful yardstick for a fair election), on the other hand we _are_ the nation that made booth capturing famous. I recall a story (no links, I shamefully admit) from a recent election where an attempt at capturing was averted by the local booth-in-charge escaping with the voting machine in it’s special briefcase with only a couple of bodyguards. This would have been much harder (impossible?) with boxes full of paper votes. The voting continued once security was beefed up.

Stuart’s assumption that more voters means more spreading out of cost is too idealistic. There is not much money to begin with, and the logistics are made worse by geography and lack of development – if you need to run a voting booth in a remote Himalayan village that is not accessible by road, a briefcase-sized machine is again much easier to handle than boxes of paper.

I’m not about to defend Diebold and its security practices, which are obviously in need of tightening (not to mention its PR efforts, which I gather are rife with overstated security claims). But…

[from the NYT article]

Computer scientists who have studied the vulnerability say the flaw might allow someone with brief access to a voting machine and with knowledge of computer code to tamper with the machine’s software, and even, potentially, to spread malicious code to other parts of the voting system.

{BEGIN sarcasm}

What a coincidence! I’ve recently uncovered a potentially devastating flaw in paper ballot voting systems. The flaw would allow anyone with brief access to a ballot box to insert large numbers of fraudulent votes, which would then be counted as valid, or to destroy all the previously entered votes, making them unreadable. Obviously, then, every company that has ever marketed paper ballot-based voting materials has been laughably negligent–as has any jurisdiction that has ever used them.

{END sarcasm}

Let me make a few assertions here, and see if we can all agree on them:

1. A voting technology is not a voting system. A voting system is one or more technologies combined with a collection of procedures for using them to run elections.

2. Any voting technology, no matter how carefully designed and implemented, is doomed to be insecure if embedded in a sufficiently broken system. (See, for example, Karlof, Sastry and Wagner.) Conversely, any voting technology, no matter how poorly designed and implemented, is probably securable (though possibly at a prohibitive cost) using sufficiently elaborate surrounding procedures.

3. Older technologies will inevitably seem more secure than newer ones, because the procedures surrounding them have evolved, in response to attacks, to the point where known attacks have generally been mitigated, and novel attacks are unlikely.

4. Therefore, in evaluating new voting technologies, we should treat newly discovered attacks not as refutations of the new technology, but rather as challenges to both the technology designers and the system designers to mitigate them (challenges which they may or may not be able to meet at an acceptable cost).

———

There is an unfortunate tendency in the computer security research community to overplay the significance of new attacks. This weakness is understandable: attacks, unlike claims of security, are empirically verifiable, often using spiffy demos; they can have immediate and substantial real-world impact, whereas new security technologies must first be built, tested, sold, deployed, and so on; and they place security researchers in the enviable role of scolding expert rather than supplicant technology salesman.

But they should remember that their job, first and foremost, is to provide the world with more secure systems–not simply to break things. And while I’m certainly glad that the weaknesses in voting systems like Diebold’s are being exposed, I wish security researchers would exercise a little more perspective each time they find one. After all, all technologies have such weaknesses, and new technologies inevitably have as-yet-undiscovered ones.

The far more interesting question is how the ultimate result of the vulnerability discover-repair cycle for this technology and its surrounding system will end up comparing with systems based on other technologies. Security researchers should have something interesting to say about that question, but so far, I’m sad to say, the community has generated a lot more heat than light on the subject.

Doctor G, My comments were directed largely at those who are drawing broad conclusions about the long-term viability of various voting technologies based on the Diebold case. I’m certainly prepared to believe that Diebold’s devices are a mess. But that revelation is akin to the discovery that a particular highway contractor is using inferior-grade concrete: it obliges the government to take remedial measures, and encourages it to select a different contractor next time, but it says little, fundamentally, about the safety of roads in general, or even about the viability of specific road-building technologies.

Given the narrow significance of the Diebold findings, then, why are security researchers so interested–indeed involved–in them? I believe it’s largely because, as I explained, security researchers are powerfully tempted to focus on attacking specific technologies rather than securing systems. And once they do so, they must then justify themselves by claiming broader significance for the attacks than they really deserve.

Dan, I think the quality of our elections is more important than the quality of our concrete, and so I don’t find the involvement of security experts in the fight for honest elections to be surprising, or a problem. And I haven’t detected any lack of systems thinking in the security literature. In the case of the Diebold software (and other programs like it), I don’t think that any system can be devised to use them safely, short of airport-style security checks at the polls. Why bother, when paper works so well?

I’m in no way technophobic and I don’t mean to “draw long-term conclusions about the viability of various voting technologies based on the Diebold case”. Certainly it should be perfectly possible to create secure voting machines. But it seems to be a solution in search of a problem, and one driven more by technology companies with good lobbyists looking for new revenue sources than any benefit for the electorate.

Sorry–make that three final comments. (Insert Monty Python reference here….)