/. [Voting Isn't Easy, Even if Cheating Is]
Eugen Leitl
eugen at leitl.org
Tue Aug 1 23:47:59 PDT 2006
Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/01/191235
Posted by: timothy, on 2006-08-01 20:02:00
The Open Voting Foundation's disclsosure that only one switch need be
flipped to allow the machine to [1]boot from an unverified external
flash drive instead of the built-in, verified EEPROM drew more than
600 comments; some of the most interesting ones are below, in today's
Backslash story summary.
Expressing a common sentiment, reader cmd finds nothing innocent about
the inclusion of such a switch:
Diebold also builds automated teller machines (ATM), the definitive
model for reliability and accountability.
The AccuVote machines are what they are, not due to poor design or
unintentional mistake. They are the result of a [2]deliberate intent
to enable fraud on a massive scale. Viewed from this perspective, the
AccuVote design is very good. The real problem comes when Diebold
realizes that it needs to become better at obfuscation and makes it
harder to detect the fraud.
"Electronic voting machines with no paper trail are an [3]insult to
democracy," writes pieterh. "That they come with switches to bypass
even the dubious 'safeguards' provided is hardly a surprise."
Paper trails, of course, are only as good as the people guarding the
paper; readers familar with more recent allegations of vote
manipulation may be interested in the [4]1946 confrontation in Athens,
Tennessee (pointed out by reader William J. Poser) between WWII
veterans and the election officials.
Reader Soong, though, provides a conspiracy-free explanation for the
presence of such a switch:
The ability to boot from different sources is a [5]normal debugging
feature, not in itself sinister. Should they have cleaned that up on
the production model? Yeah, sure. But verifiability is ultimately a
human concern anyway, not a tech one.
It all comes down to who you trust.
If you don't trust the polling place, make the voting machine tamper
proof. But then you have to trust the guy who built the voting
machine. You have to trust the guy who loaded the software on it at
the factory or the elections office. You have to trust the guy who
wrote the code. Even if you inspected the code, you have to trust him
to give you a binary based on that and not pull a fast one. You have
to trust his compiler to give him a binary without compiled in back
doors. I feel like I probably haven't listed all the points where this
voting machine chain of trust can break down.
Several readers pointed out that voters might better trust the
machines as well as the process of electronic voting if regulation
were more rigorous; as reader Animats puts it, "[6]slot machine
standards are much tighter":
The Nevada Gaming Control Board has [7]technical standards for slot
machines. They've had enough fraud over the years that they know what
has to be done. Some highlights:
* ... must resist forced illegal entry and must retain evidence of
any entry until properly cleared or until a new play is initiated.
A gaming device must have a protective cover over the circuit
boards that contain programs and circuitry used in the random
selection process and control of the gaming device, including any
electrically alterable program storage media. The cover must be
designed to permit installation of a security locking mechanism by
the manufacturer or end user of the gaming device.
* ... must exhibit total immunity to human body electrostatic
discharges on all player-exposed areas. ...
* A gaming device may exhibit temporary disruption when subjected to
electrostatic discharges of 20,000 to 27,000 volts DC ... but must
exhibit a capacity to recover and complete an interrupted play
without loss or corruption of any stored or displayed information
and without component failure. ...
* Gaming device power supply filtering must be sufficient to prevent
disruption of the device by repeated switching on and off of the
AC power. ... must be impervious to influences from outside the
device, including, but not limited to, electro-magnetic
interference, electro-static interference, and radio frequency
interference.
* All gaming devices which have control programs residing in one or
more Conventional ROM Devices must employ a mechanism approved by
the chairman to verify control programs and data. The mechanism
used must detect at least 99.99 percent of all possible media
failures. If these programs and data are to operate out of
volatile RAM, the program that loads the RAM must reside on and
operate from a Conventional ROM Device.
* All gaming devices having control programs or data stored on
memory devices other than Conventional ROM Devices must:
1. Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which verifies
that all control program components, including data and
graphic information, are authentic copies of the approved
components. The chairman may require tests to verify that
components used by Nevada licensees are approved components.
The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less
than 1 in 10 to the 38th power and must prevent the execution
of any control program component if any component is
determined to be invalid. Any program component of the
verification or initialization mechanism must be stored on a
Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being
authenticated using a method approved by the chairman.
2. Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which tests
unused or unallocated areas of any alterable media for
unintended programs or data and tests the structure of the
storage media for integrity. The mechanism must prevent
further play of the gaming device if unexpected data or
structural inconsistencies are found.
3. Provide a mechanism for keeping a record, in a form approved
by the chairman, anytime a control program component is
added, removed, or altered on any alterable media. The record
must contain a minimum of the last 10 modifications to the
media and each record must contain the date and time of the
action, identification of the component affected, the reason
for the modification and any pertinent validation
information.
4. Provide, as a minimum, a two-stage mechanism for validating
all program components on demand via a communication port and
protocol approved by the chairman. The first stage of this
mechanism must verify all control components. The second
stage must be capable of completely authenticating all
program components, including graphics and data components in
a maximum of 20 minutes. The mechanism for extracting the
authentication information must be stored on a Conventional
ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated by a
method approved by the chairman.
Those standards cover the possibility of an "alternate program" in a
slot machine, and provide a way to check for it, with logs and an
external program check capability.
The Gaming Control Board of Nevada was asked to take a look at
Diebold, and Nevada rejected Diebold equipment as a result.
Voting machines need tough standards like that. They don't have them.
Even if e-voting machines had a spec list that would pass at the
Gaming Commission, Midnight Thunder is puzzled that [8]tamper-proofing
techniques aren't more evident on the Diebold machines:
Given taxi meters and electricity meters both have tamper seals, you
would have thought that these would have visible tamper seals as well.
If in doubt you could even have two tamper seals: one from Diebold and
another from the voting commission, in order to ensure that both
parties are satisfied with the state of the machine.
Several readers are for canning electronic voting for U.S. elections
completely. Reader Iamthefallen wants to know
Has anyone answered the question regarding [9]need for automated vote
counting in a satisfactory way?
Seems to me that manual counting of votes would be vastly more secure
as it would take a huge conspiracy to affect the result either way.
Counting a hundred million votes is hard, counting a thousand votes in
a hundred thousand locations is easy.
Similarly, slofstra writes
Sorry, I have [10]never seen the point of these machines. Paper
ballots are auditable, user friendly, and if electronics is put into
the reporting system, can be counted in a few minutes and submitted.
Voting machine are a perfect example of a technology fetish at work.
It would make an interesting case study to examine the economic and
sociological reasons why we sometimes buy technology that we don't
need, don't want and further, serves no useful purpose.
(Augmenting electronic voting machines with a paper record is a
frequently raised idea; reader megaditto, for one, asks "Is it that
hard to put a [11]thermal printer behind a glass shield?" A similar
system is [12]required in Nevada voting machines already.)
Paper ballots and electronic ones aren't the only options, though;
lever-based voting machines have dominated recent American national
elections. Mark Walling writes
My district [13]switched to electronic- from lever-based. in 2004, at
7:15 when I voted on lever machines, there was no line, and just about
as many signatures in the book. In 2005, the line was out the door and
around the corner at the same time. The person in front of me took 5
minutes to use the electronic machine. People knew how to use the old
machines, and they were reliable. These new things take the old people
forever to use, and then they complain that they were hard to read ...
Reader WillAffleckUW suggests skipping in-person voting completely;
absentee voting is a good idea, he argues, not only in light of the
flaws (demonstrated or alleged) in electronic voting methods, but
because
[14]absentee voters get a paper ballot that is not only delivered by a
trusted source (the U.S. Post Office) who have a verified date/time
stamp -- and that the ballots can be audited, traced, and verified --
now that is a reason to register permanent absentee.
Not so fast, says reader JDAustin:
I suggest you take a look at the research into the recent Washington
state elections done by [15]SoundPolitics.com. They verified [16]close
to a 20% error rate in absentee balloting. The signature verification
on absentee balloting is no verification at all due to
non-verification being done by those who count the ballots.
Additionally, the USPS is not a trusted source, they are just another
government bureaucracy. The ballots themselves cannot necessarily be
traced nor verified -- and even when the signatures are completely
different, they are still counted. Due to the nature of voter rolls,
duplicate ballots are sent out all the time due to slight variation in
a person's name, and the duplicate ballots counts are not caught until
after the final tally has been done and the election finished.
Finally, mischievous government officials can always delay sending the
military their ballots so those serving overseas do not have time to
get their vote in on time. This actually happened in 2004 in
Washington state.
Permanent absentee is not the solution. Neither is electronic voting.
The true solution takes elements of the recent Mexican election to
prevent fraud (voter ID cards, thumb inking, precinct-based monitoring
and tallying) and combine them with the best paper-based voting
machine.
_________________________________________________________________
Many thanks to the readers (especially those quoted above) whose
comments informed this discussion.
References
1. http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/31/1646246&tid=172
2.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15818579&sid=192689&tid=172
3.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15818434&sid=192689&tid=172
4.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BATTLE_OF_ATHENS?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US
5.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15822092&sid=192689&tid=172
6.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15819725&sid=192689&tid=172
7. http://gaming.nv.gov/stats_regs/reg14_tech_stnds.pdf
8.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15818707&sid=192689&tid=172
9.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15818594&sid=192689&tid=172
10.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15818593&sid=192689&tid=172
11.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15818877&sid=192689&tid=172
12. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/04/1443257&tid=172
13.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15818485&sid=192689&tid=172
14.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15819102&sid=192689&tid=172
15. http://soundpolitics.com/
16.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=15819391&sid=192689&tid=172
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com
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