In their rush to avoid a repeat of the controversy that plagued the 2000 presidential election, and to meet the requirements of Congress's hastily mandated 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), states and counties flocked to electronic voting systems they hoped would eliminate hanging chads and other flaws inherent in paper-based systems. Six years later, with another presidential election less than three months away, many e-voting systems are fraught with security glitches, and the technology has yet to prove itself as the solution voters were looking for.

Such systems could allow voters and poll workers to place multiple votes, crash the systems by loading viruses, and fake vote tallies, according to studies commissioned by the states of California and Ohio within the past year. Makers of these systems have countered that the test settings were unrealistic. But that is not helping election officials sleep better at night.

One of the reasons e-voting systems turned out to be such a failure is that the only people involved in checking these systems were the vendors, who wanted to sell their technology, and the local election officials, who were ill-equipped to understand the security issues, says David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor and founder of the Verified Voting Foundation, a nonprofit organization pushing for the implementation of voting processes that can more easily be verified and audited. "There was a certification process in place," Dill says, "but it had very little to do with security."

Dill is the author of Attackdog, threat modeling software that can examine more than 9,000 potential ways a voting system can be attacked, including computer hacking, ballot tampering and voter impersonation. Attackdog is part of a larger effort called A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE) , which was launched in 2005 by the National Science Foundation with $7.5 million in funding. "Nothing we do now will affect the November election," Dill says. "We don't know how to make secure paperless voting."

This sentiment is echoed in many places throughout the U.S., most prominently in the hotly contested state of Ohio, where Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has commissioned a series of tests over the past year to determine whether e-voting systems are secure enough to be trusted. Based on these tests Brunner has concluded that they are not secure, a decision that Premier Election Solutions, Inc., in Allen, Tex., took exception to. Premier sued Brunner and one Ohio county board of elections in May in a move to get the courts to rule that the company had fulfilled its contractual obligations to the state.

Brunner struck back August 6 by countersuing Premier, formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc., and maker of the touch-screen voting systems into which Ohio has invested more than $62 million since 2005. Brunner's suit accuses Premier of, among other things, breach of contract and breach of warranty, and seeks court acknowledgement that Premier did not honor its contract. The countersuit also asks for damages of at least $25,000 against Premier for voting system malfunctions that have caused problems in at least 11 of the 44 counties using Premier's technology during elections since 2005. "We believe that Premier's equipment has failed to perform as required by its contracts and according to state law," Brunner says. "We have taken this action to recover taxpayer funds spent for voting systems used in half of the state's 88 counties."

8 Comments

1. 1. John_Toradze 09:36 PM 8/18/08

   As a software engineer, there I say it is absolutely impossible to make an electronic voting system that can be trusted. Period. I have been through all the BS that proponents and people that work on the concept have said. It cannot be done. A major reason it cannot be done is that unique identifiers for users that can be traced to them are out. All the explanations otherwise are handwaving baloney.
   
   The only variant that could be trusted at all is one that spits out a hard copy on strong plastic or card stock. Then those cards can be inserted into a separate, dumb machine. But even this requires a unique identifier, and it can be hacked with a denial of service attack by manufacturing multiple identical identified cards, thereby destroying that vote in an audit.

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2. 2. RecordRat 02:24 PM 8/19/08

   Brunner's own studies showed that all computerized voting systems can be hacked. Over 50 scientific studies corroborate that software can be altered without detection, because malware can erase itself. It is absolutely ludicrous that public elections are run on the worse possible technology available - undetectably mutable software. So, for 2008, we'll have another election that provides us with no rational basis for confidence in reported results.
   
   See Debunking: http://snipurl.com/31wg5
   Warning: http://snipurl.com/31v1x
   Full 50+ Bibliography: http://snipurl.com/30nhj
   

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3. 3. markg8 11:16 AM 8/20/08

   The optical scanners are just as hackable and prone to breakdown as the touch screen machines. That's not very clear in the article especially with Burner's quote at the end. If we're to have confidence in our elections then count the ballots by hand. All the machines are undetectable vote fraud enabling junk.
   
   
   
   

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4. 4. uncoveror 11:51 AM 8/21/08

   The whole point of these machines from day one was to rig elections. The ruling class have never had any interest in giving the rabble a real voice. Elections are no more real than a wrestling show if they can help it.

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5. 5. jack dumnphy 01:14 PM 8/21/08

   Not to mention the standards were written by politicians with no software knowledge, and then left to be evaluated by test houses in collusion, like systest in colorado: http://www.opednews.com/articles/SysTest-Labs-under-Fire-Fo-by-Rady-Ananda-080815-39.html

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6. 6. Ska-T 09:20 PM 8/21/08

   The vote is the foundation of democracy. To put private, for profit corporations in charge of recording and counting the people's vote is short sighted. To allow them to count the vote with proprietary software in secrete invites tyranny.
   "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
   "It's not the people who vote that counts. It's the people who count the votes." - Josef Stalin

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7. 7. Tocque Deville 10:56 AM 8/22/08

   Another election approaches and yet another establishment media outlet does a story decrying the perils of e-voting too late to do anything about it.
   
   Good job. This issue has been obvious to anyone with a PC for almost a decade. Not only have numerous tests been conducted proving that computerized voting (not to mention tabulation which is just as vulnerable and was omitted from this article), but there is more than compelling evidence that computerized systems have thrown elections.
   
   These systems aren't imperfect. If one were to design a system for election rigging, they could not have done better.
   
   It is nice that SciAm has decided to cover this issue. But it's too little too late. We are about to hand over yet another American election to a few private companies who have shown nothing but contempt for the principles of open, transparent democracy.
   
   
   

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8. 8. neel 09:33 AM 3/18/10

   'EVMs illegally being used for a decade' -Legal Research Paper published in India at Chennai
   
   Author - Ajay Jagga, Punjab & Haryana High Court Lawyer, India
   
   Sanjay Sharma, TNN, Feb 22, 2010, 03.44am IST
   CHANDIGARH: The electronic voting machines (EVMs) are being used in violation of the Information Technology Act 2000, a research paper has revealed.
   
   Author of the research paper, advocate Ajay Jagga, told The Times of India, on Sunday that as per IT Act, 2000, a verifiable audit trail has to be provided in case of any electronic record, which is now admissible as evidence as per Evidence Act but in case of electronic voting, the voter does not get any receipt with regard to his voting.
   
   The research paper recently attracted the attention of experts when a conference on "EVMs: How trustworthy? " in Chennai passed a unanimous resolution on February 13, to approach the Election Commission of India (ECI) for bringing the electronic voting procedure in tune with IT Act, 2000.
   
   Jagga said he would soon approach ECI seeking formation of legal committee to remove the illegality or will knock the doors of court.He said the voter comes across a beep and flash, but what has happened inside the machine and whether the data has been recorded as per the wish of the elector, is not know. It is just like deposited money in the bank and official of the bank says no receipt is required.
   
   The lawyer said, "Unless the voter gets a receipt like the one we get in ATM or after the use of debit or credit cards, all electronic transactions including a vote, are illegal." What is the evidence that the vote cast has really been recorded and that it has been recorded in the manner the voter intended, he asked.
   
   For the purpose and to protect the secrecy of ballot, all such receipts, after the voter has checked his transaction, should be put in a box which should remain with ECI to be produced as evidence in case of a dispute, he said. The government amended the relevant laws in 1989 to equate EVM with ballot and ballot box to facilitate transition from ballot paper to EVM but the IT Act 2000 created a new complication that has to be immediately resolved in the interest of fairness of things, Jagga pointed out.
   
   

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