E-Voting Dissent
Sara Wilson, Katie Noto, John Massie,
Will Sutherland, Molly Cooper
BACKGROUND
• Electronic voting (e-voting) encompasses voting
methods that enable votes to be cast and
counted electronically.
• E-voting examples = optically scanned ballots
and direct recording electronic voting machines
• Optically scan voting systems read bubbled-in
paper ballots through an optical scanner (similar
to multiple choice exams).
• Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting
machines use buttons or a touchscreen in the
voting process (similar to an ATM machine).
ELECTORAL FRAUD
• Hackers can tamper with election results from DREs
• It is often impossible to determine if the system has
been hacked into
• DREs are programmed using closed source code
– The public cannot look at the code, and programmers can
be bribed or threatened
• Physical tampering is another danger
• In the 2004 election, computer science experts
determined that hacking into DREs was quite possible
and that security was weak
BUGS
• DREs often have serious flaws with both their software and their
hardware
• These “bugs” are extremely hard to detect, and
finding them before elections is nearly impossible
The result? Here are just a few examples:
• In the 2000 elections, DRE machines in one county
gave Al Gore negative 16,022 votes.
• In a recent California Election, bugs in DRE software resulted
in 36 precincts being unable to vote
• In a recent Iowa election, DRE machines showed 140,000 votes in a
county where only 25,000 people were registered to vote
• In a recent Virginia election, 50% of precincts were unable vote due to
DRE malfunctions
There are literally hundreds of other examples of serious,
costly DRE malfunctions. The result is always the same:
• Small problems have HUGE ramifications
MAINTENANCE AND EXPENSE
• Implementation of DREs requires properly
trained engineers specialists to maintain the
software and the hardware
• Poll employees have to deal with electronic
machine malfunction and possible data loss
• Electronic voting machines are complex,
expensive instruments
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
VERIFICATION
• Once
the voter has submitted his vote, it goes into a “black box” and
cannot be accessed or changed by the voter
• Some DREs print out a paper audit (receipt), which the voter can check,
but there is not a way for the voter to ensure that the vote is tallied as it
was submitted.
• “‘Unless someone can come up with a foolproof method of producing a
paper trail with touch-screen machines, this [banning touch-screen voting]
is how we need to go,’ says Florida Senator Bill Nelson, pointing out that
attempts up to now to make DRE paper-trail compatible have too often led
to printer paper jams and other ‘screw-ups’” (TIME article).
• “Ultimately, voters want to know that their vote was included in the final
tally. Paper audit trails do not provide this assurance” (Castro).
SECURITY/OTHER
CONCERNS
• Natural Disasters
• Power Outages
• System Crashes/Failures
"By far the most justifiable criticism of DRE machines is
that they fail during service or in some cases cannot even be
brought into service on election day. There are numerous
documented instances of such failures. These incidents are real.
They are intolerable when they interfere with the act of voting…”
-Michael Shamos
(Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computers,
Freedom and Privacy)
VARIOUS PROBLEMS
•
"Feedback from 14 blind and visually impaired voters in Santa Clara County,
California showed that many of them found the Sequoia voting machines
unacceptable and were disappointed that Sequoia didn't listen to their
suggestions. They said the machines performed poorly and were anything but
user-friendly in the March [2004] election."
•
Among the criticisms provided by voters was poor sound quality, delayed
response time and Braille that was positioned so awkwardly it could be read
upside down. [Sam] Chen, a retired college professor, also said the audio
message required blind voters to press a yellow button. 'Yellow means nothing
to me,' Chen said."
•
“In New Mexico, during the 2004 election, electronic ballots in Hispanic and
Native American precincts registered three times as many undervotes (no vote
cast) as the electronic ballots in Anglo precincts. But when the state switched to
paper ballots, the undervote rates in minority precincts were comparable to
those in Anglo precincts.”
•
All from http://www.votingmachinesprocon.org/subdisabled.htm
REFERENCES
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRE_voting_machine
• http://www.eff.org/issues/e-voting
• http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,115608page,1/article.html
• http://www.evoting-experts.com/
• http://www.hss.caltech.edu/%7Evoting/CalTech_MIT_
Report_Version2.pdf
• http://www.votingmachinesprocon.org/subdisabled.ht
m
• http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,16804
51,00.html
• http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=
1105058