Colorado The Latest To Ditch E-Voting Machines

from the sounds-familiar dept

Just days after Ohio announced problems with all of the e-voting machines used in that state, Colorado has decertified e-voting machines from all four major vendors in the space, noting serious problems with them all, including a 1% error rate in counting ballots (1%!). So at what point do the e-voting companies stop stonewalling and finally just admit that they need to start again from scratch? At this point, it's beyond clear that none of these firms is even the least bit trustworthy -- and yet, they continue to protest these decertifications, despite piles upon piles of evidence that these machines have serious problems.

Filed Under: colorado, e-voting
Companies: diebold, es&s, hart intercivic, premiere voting, sequoia

E-Voting Ballots May Not Be So Secret; Paper Trail Takes Away Anonymity

from the line-'em-up,-match-'em-up dept

Another day, another security problem with e-voting machines. Obviously, one of the biggest requests from people who were nervous about the security of e-voting machines was that all e-voting machines have a verifiable paper trail. Then, at least, there's a way to recount the votes if there are any questions. Unfortunately, even when the e-voting companies finally do add a paper trail, it seems that they muck up the process. As was noted in the recent security analysis of these machines, many of the problems are because they weren't designed from the ground up with security in mind, but rather have security procedures slapped on as extras.

In this case, some Ohio activists discovered that the paper trail coming from e-voting firm Election Systems and Software (ES&S) happen to have time and date stamps on them. Those ballots are available for anyone to look at, based on election law in Ohio. Also available for anyone to peruse are the voter sign-in logs. With both of those in hand, it's not hard to put together a pretty decent list of who voted for what. You just match up the names in the order they signed in with the timestamp on the ballots.

Of course, rather than responding to this as they should, by admitting it was a bad idea, ES&S sends out their PR people to say it's no big deal. While ES&S is right that it might not always be possible to do an exact match person to person, you can come pretty close -- and that should be seen as a huge concern. Furthermore, as Ed Felten points out, the other e-voting firms aren't much better, and Diebold (or Premiere, or whatever its new name is) appears to be outright lying skirting the truth when it claims that its paper trail doesn't include timestamps (update:: Ed Felten points out that the Diebold ballots don't have a time stamp, but the electronic records do). It's not hard to see how this happened, but the continued denial and stonewalling from the e-voting companies, rather than admitting a mistake was made and explaining how they're going to fix things, really is troubling.

Filed Under: e-voting, ohio
Companies: diebold, es&s, hart intercivic, sequoia

California Decertifies E-Voting Machines... Then Recertifies Them (With A Few Conditions)

from the not-quite-what-we-hoped-for dept

Following the release of the various independent security reports last week on the e-voting machines used in Californa, the Secretary of State needed to decide by Friday night whether to keep the machines in use in the state. At 11:45pm, she decided to decertify the machines only to immediately recertify them if they made some security changes. Of course, it seems like the changes are simply patches, and as the original report noted, many of the security problems the machines have is because all of the security they've implemented was patched on as an afterthought. Until the machines are designed from the ground up with security in mind, it's not likely to really fix many of the vulnerabilities. But, in the meantime, there's an election coming up, and apparently a bunch of major security problems are no reason to get rid of the expensive e-voting machines the state has already purchased.

Filed Under: california, e-voting
Companies: diebold, es&s, hart intercivic, sequoia

Security Experts Able To Hack Into Nearly Every E-Voting Machine

from the seems-a-bit-troublesome dept

Back in March, California decided that after years of negative publicity about the security of e-voting machines (and certainly enough evidence to suggest they weren't very secure) that it would allow independent security experts to try to hack into any machine before it got approval to be used in California elections. Those researchers have gone ahead and found that every machine they tested was hackable -- often very easily. The researchers were able to hack into Diebold, Sequoia and Hart InterCivic machines. They didn't get a chance to test ES&S machines because, as you may recall, ES&S stalled before handing over their source code (and included a nasty threatening letter with it). To be fair, these machines were tested in non-normal conditions, where the researchers had access to all sorts of documentation, the full source code and no election going on where people might spot them tampering with a machine. That is, this doesn't mean that it's necessarily easy to hack an election. It just means that all of the machines have some insecurities -- most of which we didn't know about before. The key here is that we can now understand these insecurities and whether or not they're adequately protected by other measures. What still doesn't make sense is why the e-voting firms are so against this process. All it's really doing is helping those companies improve their products to make them more secure. Of course, one key reason is that the researchers found that many of the security problems are because the machines weren't built with security in mind -- but only had it added as an afterthought. In other words, these companies probably should be redesigning their machines from scratch, which they don't want to do. Of course, does it worry anyone else that the machines weren't designed with security in mind in the first place?

Filed Under: california, e-voting, security
Companies: diebold, es&s, hart intercivic, sequoia