The Big Rig

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.bostonmagazine.com/ArticleDisplay.php?id=454&print=yes>

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The Big Rig
by Jake Halpern
 Copyright October 2004.

Could someone steal your vote on election day? Let us count the ways.

Lately it seems that virtually everyone I know -- Democrats, Republicans,
and Naderites alike -- is espousing outlandish theories about plots to
sway, postpone, or outright steal next month's election. "You just watch,"
a normally levelheaded friend of mine told me. "Three days before election
day they're going to bring Osama out of his subterranean cell and parade
him around like the Republican mascot."

 Of course, I realize that we are a nation of X-Files-watching, Art
Bell-listening, wigged-out paranoiacs, but it's really getting to me, and
this is why I decided to visit Ben Adida, who is a star Ph.D. student at
MIT in the field of cryptography and information security. Adida's area of
focus is voting machines and processes, and his specialty is breaking into
them. It's his job, as part of the Caltech-MIT/Voting Technology Project,
to determine the ways in which an election can be stolen right out of the
ballot box.

 When I meet Adida at his cubbyhole of an office on the MIT campus, he is
wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a pair of blue Puma sneakers. In short,
he has the look of your classic twentysomething hacker from the movies,
though he is quick to point out that the proper term for cyber-scoundrels
is "cracker."

 "Technically, a hacker is simply a clever programmer, whereas a cracker is
someone who actually breaks into systems," Adida explains. When it comes to
voting machines, he is emphatic. "Every machine can be cracked into," he
says.

 These days, most of the publicized concerns about voting machines involve
the direct-recording electric (DRE) models-generally, touch-screen systems
that resemble ATMs. The chief problem with these is that they leave no
paper trail, and this could create quite a ruckus when George W. Bush
and/or John Kerry demand recounts.

 If you haven't heard much about DREs in the Boston press, that's because
they are not currently approved for use in Massachusetts. This doesn't mean
you'll be using the punch cards that caused so much trouble in Florida;
that system has been banned in this state since 1997. Those creaky old
mechanical-lever machines once commonplace here, meanwhile, also have been
outlawed effective with next month's election.

 As a result, if you live in Massachusetts, you will likely be voting via
the optical scanner system, which requires you to indicate your choices by
filling in the bubbles on a sheet of paper, much like on the SAT. This
method will be used by 55 million people, or 32 percent of voters, in the
United States and is generally regarded as the most reliable.

 Time to breathe easy? Not exactly. According to Adida, "No one will be
able to crack into the [optical scanning] system via the Internet from
their basement and skew the results. However, the crackers can succeed if
they have hands-on access to the actual machine."

 Here is one possible scenario for how this could be done: Several weeks
before the election, a cracker might gain access to an optical scanning
device and reprogram it to favor a particular candidate. This is where
things get interesting. Because the list of candidates is often not entered
into the system until hours before an election, the crackers have no way of
knowing which candidate to pick -- A, B, or C. So they program the machine
to favor the candidate who gets the most votes between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.,
then tell their supporters to vote first thing in the morning. "Usually,
when people hear this type of scenario for the first time they freak out,"
Adida says with a mischievous smile.

 There are simpler methods, too. For example, many optical scanning
machines use red lasers to scan, which means that they cannot read red ink.
Theoretically, someone could pass out red pens at a voting station in a
precinct known to vote a certain way, invalidating many of that precinct's
votes.

 As Adida continues to ramble about potential weaknesses in our voting
system, I can't help but feel that some amount of paranoia is justified.
According to the Caltech-MIT/Voting Technology Project, some 120,000 votes
by Massachusetts residents were not counted in the 2000 presidential
election. You have to wonder whether all of these invalidated ballots were
the result of simple errors. Perhaps this is why at least 12 members of
Congress have signed a letter asking the United Nations to monitor this
year's election. Perhaps it is time to get nervous.

 When I express this to Adida, he nods somberly. "It's my job to be
completely paranoid about elections," he tells me with a heavy sigh.
"Because the stakes in presidential elections are so high, the motivation
to do evil is also quite high, and so we have a plan for every possible
scenario."

 This is all good and fine, I tell him. Plan, plan, plan away. What I
wanted to know was whether any of this might really happen. What I wanted
was peace of mind. "I don't know of any optical scanning system being
cracked," Adida says finally. "But then again, it's conceivable that
someone could alter the results discreetly enough that no one would ever
know until it was too late."



-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'