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Holt: When it Comes to Voting, a Paper Ballot System Is a Must

sparky3887 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:28:09 +0000

New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt (D) recently reintroduced the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, a bill that would create a national voting standard that would require paper-ballot voting systems and accessible ballot-marking devices coupled with routine random audits of electronic voting tallies. “Congress should pass a national standard ensuring that all voters can record their votes on paper and requiring that in every election, randomly selected precincts be audited,” Holt says. In every federal election since 2003, when the Help America Vote Act was enacted, citizen watchdog groups have collected information on voting machine failures. In 2004, the Election Incident Reporting System received more than 4,800 voting machine complaints from all but eight states, and in 2006 a sampling of voting machine problems gathered by election integrity groups and the media exposed more than 1,000 incidents in more than 300 counties in all but 14 states. In 2008, the Our Vote Live hotline received almost 2,000 voting machine problem reports in all but a dozen states, and 19 states conducted completely unauditable elections. Paperless electronic voting is preferred by many election officials, but it is unverifiable and unauditable, and computer scientists say that computers are unreliable without an independent audit mechanism. “The clear trend is towards paper ballots,” says Holt. “In fact, every jurisdiction that has chosen to change its voting system since 2006 has chosen to use paper ballots with optical scan counting. That should be the standard.”

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Computer Scientists Deploy First Practical Web-Based Secure, Verifiable Voting System

sparky3887 — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 04:24:50 +0000

The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) and scientists at the University Catholique de Louvain in Belgium deployed a Web-based, secure, verifiable-voting system for the Belgium presidential election that was held in early March. Called Helios, the system was developed by CRCS fellow Ben Adida. “Helios allows any participant to verify that their ballot was correctly captured, and any observer to verify that all captured ballots were correctly tallied,” Adida says. “We call this open-audit voting because the complete auditing process is now available to any observer.” The open source software uses advanced cryptographic techniques to maintain ballot secrecy while providing a mathematical proof that the election tally was correctly computed. Helios uses public-key homomorphic encryption, a method in which a public key is used to encrypt a message, or a vote. Homomorphic encryption allows messages to be combined while still encrypted, which works for counting votes, and requires multiple private keys to decrypt a message, which was the election tally. In an election, voters receive a tracking number for each of their votes, and each vote is encrypted with the election public key before leaving the voter’s browser. Voters can then use their tracking numbers to verify that their ballot was correctly captured by the voting system, which publishes a list of all tracking numbers received before tallying. Finally, the voter, or any observer, can verify that the tracking numbers and votes were tallied appropriately. Adida says the encryption allows the entire verification process to take place without revealing the contents of each vote.

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Report: Diebold Voting System Has ‘Delete’ Button for Erasing Audit Logs

sparky3887 — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:00:46 +0000

An investigation by California’s secretary of state into why a product made by e-voting system vendor Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) lost about 200 ballots in Humboldt County during the U.S. presidential election revealed the presence of a “clear” button in some versions of the machine’s Global Election Management System (GEMS) software that allows someone to permanently erase audit logs from the system. The secretary of state’s report says the logs “contain–or should contain–records that would be essential to reconstruct operator actions during the vote tallying process.” The proximity of the clear button to the “print” and “save as” buttons raises the risk of the logs being erased accidentally, and the system provides no warning to operators of the danger of clicking on the button. Premier/Diebold retained the button despite an apparent warning from a system developer, and though the button was removed from subsequent iterations of the software, the version with the button is still used in three California counties and other U.S. states. The report says that under the voting system standards “each of the errors and deficiencies in the GEMS version 1.18.19 software…standing alone would warrant a finding by an Independent Testing Authority (ITA) of ‘Total Failure’ (indicated by a score of 1.0) had the flaw been detected.” The California report’s findings bring up issues about the auditing logs on voting systems made by other vendors, and about what course of action states that use the Premier system will follow now that they are aware that their voting software fails to produce a sufficient audit trail to guarantee the integrity of an election.

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