Despite the threat of legal action by one voting machine vendor, Princeton University professor Ed Felten is continuing his independent investigation of perceived irregularities in New Jersey's February 5, 2008 presidential primary election. On Friday, a New Jersey state judge ruled that voting rights activists will also have the right to have their own independent expert examine the state's electronic voting machines.
The question is integrity. What Felten has found so far isn't enough to change the election results, but evidence presented on his blog site suggests there might be enough to undermine our confidence in the electronic system as it stands. Various county clerks in New Jersey who perceive the February counts as being off have supplied Felten with voting machines and paper audits. Sequoia Voting Systems, which produces most of the voting machines in New Jersey, has threatened legal action against Felten and his team if they pursue an independent investigation. Sequoia has said it would appoint its own team of investigators.
The threats haven't stopped Felten.
On March 19, Felten wrote that the "opinion switch," meaning the number of times the ballot was changed to Democrat or Republican, didn't add up to the total votes cast for each party. In this case, there was always one extra vote.
On March 20, Felten posted Sequoia's response. In part, the vendor said that "we have found that when a poll worker selects the lower of the two assigned selection codes, followed by pressing an unused selection code and then pressing the green 'Activate' button, the higher numbered party on the operator panel has its contests activated instead while the selection code button for the original party stays active on the operator panel."
From this, Felten concludes that Sequoia made an engineering error because "no competent engineer would design this system to ever activate the Republican ballot when the poll worker had pressed the DEM button but had not pressed the REP button." Also, "Sequoia's explanation involves a voter seeing the wrong party's ballot being activated, and not complaining about it," he said.
Felten said he found evidence that could support Sequoia's claim; although the vote totals exceeded the voter turnout in one party, they were made up for in the under-reporting in the other party. However, on April 4, 2008 Felten found instatances where the overall votes cast are inconsistent with the explanation provided by Sequioa.
One week later, on April 11, the New Jersey Secretary of State, who must certify all election results, said that the tapes were misread because they were unreadable. So last week, on April 23, 2008, Felten published more examples, clearly showing the same discrepancies.
Paper trail audits have been suggested at both RSA and Shmoocon as valid procedures for certifying the final vote.
Friday's decision to allow an independent expert to examine the systems in addition to Felten's own work could shed more light on the discrepancies.
Part of the Sequoia Voting Systems Web site was defaced and subsequently taken down on Thursday, according to a report in InfoWorld. As CNET prepared this blog, the entire Sequoia Voting System site was frequently inaccessible.
The defacement and subsequent takedown occurred Thursday morning on the company's Ballot Blog page. Sequoia is one of a handful of electronic voting companies used in the United States. It has in recent days come under fire for apparent discrepancies in voter tallies in last month's New Jersey primary election.
The Ballot Blog page on SequoiaVote.com had contained information from Sequoia regarding the Super Tuesday New Jersey election, but as of Thursday afternoon the blog site was available only on and off.
Last week an independent group representing New Jersey county clerks asked Princeton University computer science professor Ed Felten to investigate the discrepancies in the New Jersey vote tallies. Felten and his team have examined Sequoia and other voting systems in the past. Most recently, Felten's team of graduate students helped the California Secretary of State Debra Bowen conduct a survey of her state's electronic voting systems. One of those graduate students, J. Alex Halderman, recently gave a talk at Shmoocon 4 suggesting that with improvements, electronic voting systems could work well in a future election.
Last Friday, Sequoia systems contacted Felten and threatened legal action if he or his students conducted an investigation of a working New Jersey voting machine. On Monday, Felten posted the e-mail on his blog . It reads:
Dear Professors Felten and Appel:
As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.
Very truly yours,
Edwin Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems
On the resurrected Ballot Blog site on Thursday, Sequoia Voting Systems announced that it had initiated its own external review of the New Jersey voting systems. The external review, the company said, would be conducted by independent parties including Kwaidan Consulting of Houston, Texas; an Election Assistance Commission (EAC)-accredited Voting System Test Lab (VSTL)--Wyle Laboratories of Huntsville, Ala., and possibly another VSTL; and an academic institution.
WASHINGTON--In a keynote address at this year's ShmooCon, an East Coast computer hacker conference, J. Alex Halderman said that electronic voting machines could be good for the electorate--with some modifications.
Halderman is a graduate student studying under Ed Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton, who is best known for demonstrating that the electronic voting machines produced by Diebold and other companies are vulnerable to attack. Diebold has since changed the name of election equipment to Premier Election Solutions. Felten was to make the keynote address, but canceled at the last minute due to the flu. Halderman is no less qualified to speak to the convention of computer hackers; this past summer, Halderman and others from Felten's team assisted California Secretary of State Debra Brown in her investigation of electronic voting machines.
At issue are direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. Halderman points out that DREs are, basically, computers, susceptible to viruses, bugs, and crashes. What troubles Halderman and his team is that "a conspiracy of one could launch an attack on all the voting machines in a county or in a state." He said that while paper ballots could be rigged, paperless electronic ballots were even easier to exploit.
With the Diebold machines Halderman studied, he found that the company provided potential attackers with an upgrade process that was easy to manipulate. By giving a malicious file a specific file name, the Diebold DREs simply ran the code, allowing a devious programmer to inject malicious code into one or more voting machines. Since the same PCMIA card can be used to load a specific ballot within a precinct, county, or state, one tainted card could easily spread the infection.
Halderman also found, when working on the voting machines used in California that voting machines could also, with very little work, expose who voted for whom, violating voter secrecy.
Diebold has previously dismissed the claims by Felten, Halderman, and others. Another California e-voting system vendor, Sequoia, issued a press release faulting the secretary of state's study. Despite their objections, most states with electronic voting systems have now required the vendors to provide some kind of a paper audit.
Once the e-voting vendors improve their systems, Halderman said e-voting could ultimately be good. Voters like it. It provides faster reporting. It also offers more accessibility to disabled voters. With the addition of paper receipts, said Halderman, e-voting will also allow for better and less expensive vote auditing.
Currently, Halderman said, recounting votes in a disputed election is costly. Using machine-assisted auditing, however, taxpayers would save money and receive a much more accurate recount. One method Halderman showed at ShmooCon involved auditing only the winning candidate's vote to see if there was any evidence of electronic vote switching. As an example, he cited a recent election in Virgina where less than 1 percent of the vote decided the winner; by the current method, 1 million ballots would need to be recounted, but by his machine-assisted auditing method only 1,000 would be needed.
- prev
- 1
- next
