The Security Mentor

It was a mixed bag yesterday, and at first glance looks more like breakdowns than like election stealing.

The most alarming reports were of "vote flipping", machines registering a vote different from what the voter intended. That was happening on touch screen machines. It's possible that the machines simply lost track of which touch went with which part of the ballot -- they can fail that way -- but nobody knows for sure. Computer science prof and founder of verifiedvoting.org, David Dill, says "It could be a calibration problem with the touchscreens, but I'm not sure that anyone really knows yet because no one's looked at it. My answer as a computer scientist is that I want facts". It sure would be a dumb way to try to steal an election.

Take a close look at the review screen if you vote on one of those machines.

And inevitably, the machine vendors blame the voters: "Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman at e-voting machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems, said the perceived problem of vote flipping is definitely human error". Diebold spokesman David Bear goes even further: "'It's not a problem,' Bear said. "It doesn't exist.'"

Less alarmingly, there were plenty of mechanical breakdowns that forced the polls ot stay open late in several places. Colorado had people waiting in line for two hours. "In Campbell County, Ky., an e-voting machine began smoking soon after polls opened at 6 a.m., said Les Fugate, spokesman for Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson. "That one truly malfunctioned, and it just smoked and was pulled" out of service, he said. The eSlate touchscreen machine from Hart InterCivic Inc. in Austin had been used without incident in the May primary when it was brand new, he said." Where this got bad is in places where voters went away before they had a chance to vote.

The terrible problem, which may keep the elections from convincing voters that the outcome was fair, is that there's no way to recount the purely electronic machines. The Virginia Senate race ended with a difference of 7,000 votes out of 2.3 million.

The most interesting thing is that the party in power lost bigtime, which wouldn't have happened if there had been widespread rigging of the machines. One theory about why tampering didn't happen: "This year's scrutiny by the media, which detailed the potential problems with e-voting, may have headed off any attempted hackings that could have flipped the results of a major race, said Bruce Funk, the former elections director for Emery County, Utah, and an outspoken critic of touch-screen systems". The price of freedom is eternal vigilance...

I remain opposed to computerized voting machines, as does every security professional I've heard from on the subject.

UPDATE 11/10:

This one isn't just a "glitch". Sarasota County, Florida, is missing 18,000 votes in the tight race for the 13th District House seat. The current margin is 368 votes. The missing 18,000, one out of every seven ballots cast, are cases where someone cast a ballot but somehow nothing registered for the House race, just for the other items on the ballot.

The voting machine vendor denies everything:

"However, we have been in contact with the supervisor of elections, who has emphasized that the voting equipment functioned well," ES&S said. "The touch-screen system used in Sarasota County provides unlimited opportunity for a voter to make and change selections before a ballot is cast. Therefore, according to the supervisor of elections, under-votes were a result of an intentional choice not to make a selection in the congressional race or unintentional omission of a selection."

Personal opinion: this is almost certainly a bug of some sort. Actual cheating could and would be much harder to detect.

An opinionated piece by an opinionated man argues that the problems were severe and pervasive, and points to the VotersUnite! database of e-voting problem reports. Brad isn't willing to tolerate the headaches we take for granted with new computer systems, not in a critical application like voting: "It is not yet a felony in the United States of America to turn a legally registered voter away from the polls without allowing him to cast a vote. But it damned well should be", he writes.

UPDATE 11/23

In the Florida election where 18,000 votes just disappeared from one county and not from others, it turns out that the county was friendly to the candidate who allegedly lost by less than 400 votes. Do the arithmetic: if she had been getting as few as 53% of the missing votes she would have won. This is America, so she's suing demanding a revote.