By Brad Friedman from St. Louis, MO…
Enough. Enough. Enough already with this nightmare. It’s time to decertify, ban, burn, crush, destroy all Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting machines. Period.
DREs should never be allowed for use in another American election. Period.
Here’s the lede from today’s latest head-spinner, courtesy of Declan McCullagh at C|NET News…
…
Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of the actual votes. “We simply take the two pieces of paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in which way,” said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio.
…
Moyer and fellow activist Jim Cropcho tested this by dropping by the election office of Delaware County, about 20 miles north of Columbus, and reviewing the results for a May 2006 vote to extend a property tax to fund mental retardation services (PDF). Their results indicate who voted “yes” and who voted “no”–and show that local couples (the Bennets, for instance) didn’t always see eye-to-eye on the tax.
ES&S machines are used in 38 states, and, of course, the ES&S spokesperson quoted in the article blames Ohio’s procedures for allowing such records to be viewed by the public in the first place. Remember, the voting machine companies hate transparency and don’t believe citizens should have the right to see anything concerning their own democracy.
They will also try to distract from the fact that the greatest threat to election integrity and security comes from election insiders — such as voting machine company employees and elections officials — rather than the public at large.
The well-reported and sourced C|NET article explains that the other major voting machine companies, Sequoia and Diebold, both deny that the same thing — matching voters to votes — is possible with their machines. An unnamed Diebold spokesperson, as usual, goes so far as to lie about the matter to the reporter, claiming they don’t include time-stamps on the records for security and privacy reason. He/she added, “We’re very sensitive to the integrity of the process.”
That Diebold spokesperson is, of course, lying.
Last week, The BRAD BLOG detailed fraudulent claims on Diebold’s website which said that on their touch-screen systems “the order of cast ballots is scrambled to further insure ballot anonymity.” That claim runs counter to the findings of University of California’s recent “Top-to-Bottom Review” of all certified voting systems in the state. The UC findings [PDF] on Diebold’s voting system source code, as commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, revealed precisely the opposite to be the truth…
The UC study detailed a “Failure to protect ballot secrecy” in Diebold’s touchscreen AccuVote TSx voting machine. They report that “Both the electronic and paper records of the Diebold AV-TSX contain enough information to compromise the secrecy of the ballot. The AV-TSX records votes in the order in which they are cast, and it records the time that each vote is cast. As a result, it is possible for election workers who have access to the electronic or paper records and who have observed the order in which individuals have cast their ballots to discover how those individuals voted.”
The fraudulent claims posted on the Diebold Election Systems, Inc., website have not be reposted since they took down the original site, and re-opened late last week as a newly renamed company. Their “new” company is called Premier Elections Solutions, and their false claim about the secrecy of ballots on the company’s touch-screen voting systems has been left off of the new site.
In today’s C|NET article, UC computer science professor David Wagner re-iterates the same concerns about privacy issues on the ballots of Diebold/Premier’s DRE voting systems:
“This summer I learned that Diebold’s AV-TSX touchscreen voting machine stores a time stamp showing the time which each vote was cast–down to the millisecond–along with the electronic record of that vote,” Wagner said in an e-mail message. “In particular, we discovered this as part of the California top-to-bottom review and reported it in our public report on the Diebold voting system. However, I had no idea that this kind of information was available to the public as a public record.”
While the voting machine companies blame Ohio for giving access to such public records to mere mortals (e.g., citizens who vote and have a right to such information), changing the public records laws in Ohio and other states in order to disallow citizen access to such things wouldn’t take care of the problem either.
“Computer scientists and security experts say restricting the public’s access to e-voting paper trails by tinkering with open records laws is insufficient,” C|NET explains wisely, “it doesn’t protect against, for instance, an insider perusing the ballots and reconstructing them.”
As we’ve tried to explain many times here, it’s the unfettered access to these systems and records by election insiders — such as elections officials and voting machine company employees — that we must be primarily concerned about. Not the acccess of the general voting public.
That much is true, no matter how much the election insiders — such as elections officials and voting machine company employees who have such unfettered access — try to tell you, and the media, otherwise.
Oh come on now; paper trails could not possibly “permit the reconstruction of an election’s results” unless the paper trails happen to be accurate, which seems unlikely. 🙂
“Perhaps the most dogged critic of electronic voting machine technology in the blogosphere.” — NY Times
“Perhaps”? Brad, you’re slipping if it’s not “Absolutely”.
Woo hoo! Got ’em on the run, right over the edge of a steep cliff.
Okay, there’s one try to post and it says “No valid entry. Please try again:”
The trail of lies is coming to an end — just like so many of the Sequoia VeriVote printers that kept running out of paper in Riverside County during the November 7, 2006 election.
Is it possible to track peoples votes and confirm that the choice is correct?
ie. if I voted Dem as voter number 134 and that shows up as a Repub vote that would show manipulation of the vote.If enough people check and find a difference in their choice …well
Next step on this would be to find local newscasters and politicians that voted, and then tell them not only how THEY voted on certain issues, but also how their wives and husbands voted.
Then remind them how easy it would be to take out a full page ad and publish a long list of names and how they voted.
I think you’ll get their attention.
Oh, and don’t forget to tell them exactly what time they cast their vote. Timestamps are a wonderful thang…
I wonder if any republicans who paid for votes will demand their money back 🙂 ?
Honestly, I would rather this be the biggest issue instead of the fact that voting machines often have no way if your vote was properly counted for the party you intended.
Obviously this is a problem, but I just can’t find it anywhere near as serious as the other voting machine problems. Seems just like a drop in the ocean at this point.
Thanks for the research and reporting on this crucial issue!
BTW, “lead” is spelled, well, “lead”, not “lede”
As the data analyst for the team which exposed this vulnerability, I’d like to invite you to our blog, The Public Ballot, where you can stay up-to-date on the progress of repairing the secret ballot.
Mike # 4 “Is it possible to track peoples votes and confirm that the choice is correct?”
That’s a great idea and should be doable yes ?
GWN with enough people checking these logs /timestamps you could PROVE fraud for the first time ever.A class action could pivot on these facts surely ?
Surely, this violates the ballot secrecy law, in which case all the votes cast with these machines, nation-wide, should be canceled and people be called to vote again using systems and/or machines which do not have this “weakness”.
Scott,
Hate to publicly embarrass, but w/r/t lede/lead, you’re wrong.
Ok, here’s what I don’t get. Diebold makes ATM machines that successfully handle multiple types of financial transactions and transfer billions of dollars all over the world each and every day. So why are their voting machines, which handle an inherently far simpler process, so fraught with problems? This makes no sense (unless it is intentional). Also, you get a receipt for each ATM transaction!!
I know! Let’s have the banking administration take over voting!
[Joke. Joke. A little black humor… relax. :-P]
Brad,
I agree with previous comments that we now have a major tool to prove electoral fraud in specific instances. This is an unbelievable slip-up on the part of the DRE gang and its accomplices.
All voting integrity organizations should be scrambling to get copies of those records everywhere, as fast as they can.
This is the first major opportunity to conduct a post-mortem of which votes were cast, by whom, and how they were tallied. This is forensic gold.
If, as has been argued for years, there has been a mix of major malfunctions and deliberate tampering involving these machines, the voters themselves can verify their own votes.
Voting integrity organizations can publish voter rolls in alphabetical order and the votes as recorded in chronological order. A web application will allow individual voters named in the rolls to verify the match between their name and their vote — privately — after they submit proof of their identity to the organization and this proof (scan of ID document) is recorded and stored for retrieval along with the encrypted name-vote match. This may be used later in litigation — or better still, for criminal indictments.
By making it a public process, you guarantee enormous publicity. There will be instant controversy and coverage. And there should be carefully planted allegations that the DRE gang and the fundamentalist Christians behind this voting-machine scam have had that access all along and are likely to have used it already. You should go so far as to allege that the Bush administration and the RNC have tapped into that information.
Go get’ em!
Phil
I wrote about similar attack late last year:
No Privacy on King County’s Touchscreens
In brief, if your poll site doesn’t somehow shuffle (mix) the order of the voters using a touchscreen, you can infer how everyone voted. Without using timestamps.
King County WA currently has a single touchscreen per poll site. So the order of the voters doesn’t get shuffled.
Ballot boxes are the physical equivalent of a secure one-way hash. After the ballot goes into the box, there’s no way to tie it back to the voter. You achieve end-to-end traceability and the public vote count by ensuring the physical security of the ballots.
At this time, there is no computerized voting system that ensures both the secret ballot and the public vote count.
Some academics think it can be done with novel voting systems (e.g. PunchScan). I remain unconvinced.
Cheers, Jason Osgood / Seattle WA