SAN JOSE, Calif. -- California voters this year will be using paper ballots that will be optically scanned and manually audited to protect against fraud and problems that have marred elections conducted with electronic voting systems, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said Wednesday.
Debra Bowen, California's secretary of state, speaks with CNET News after giving a keynote address at the Usenix security conference on the voting plan for the state.
(Credit: CNET News)In a keynote address at the Usenix security conference entitled "Dr. Strangevote or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Paper Ballot," Bowen said optical scanning was a "pretty good, although not perfect alternative" to direct-recording electronic voting.
"I don't think a perfect voting system exists or can be created because for every brilliant idea that we execute perfectly we'll have an equally brilliant person figuring out a way around it," she said.
Optical scanning preserves the original ballot and allows the state to check the accuracy of results "through hand tallies of a meaningful percentage of randomly selected precincts after every election and for every contest," she added. "Hand tallies mean never having to say 'I trust you' to hundreds of thousands of lines of code."
Touchscreen systems don't have an original record or any way to reconstruct the voter's intent, Bowen said. Also, e-voting paper trails often are confusing to voters who are forced to verify their votes on paper that appear in a different format from what they saw on the touchscreen, she said.
Not only have outcomes with electronic voting systems been challenged and questioned in real elections, but numerous studies--including a thorough study Bowen commissioned last year--have shown that the e-voting systems can be tampered with, can have programming mistakes that record the wrong results or display the wrong ballot type, and choices can be altered or interfered with as a result of something as simple as barbeque sauce stuck to the touchscreen, according to Bowen.
The frailty of e-voting systems
Reviews of electronic voting systems have found that they are susceptible to virus attacks that can corrupt data and spread from one machine to every other machine in the jurisdiction, she said. Many electronic systems have been found to have hardcoded passwords or passwords that are easy to guess or the same in every machine, and vendors have systems where a single key opens any voting machine from that company, she said.
Bowen told of the ease with which researchers were able to defeat physical security features on e-voting machine, for instance by unscrewing housings to bypass a security seal and thus leaving no evidence that the box was tampered with.
A new report on the ES&S voting systems from a team at the University of Pennsylvania found numerous exploitable vulnerabilities in the system, including the ability to delete data using handheld devices and a small magnet, she said.
With systems that use paper trails combined with electronic ballots, research has found that it can be difficult to see the results on the paper through a plastic covering that they appear behind, and many voters don't bother to try to verify their results.
A paper ballot is a permanent record that is easy to audit, whereas electronic vote records and audit logs can be altered, she said. And many e-voting systems use Microsoft Access for tallying votes, which opens the system up to fraud, she added. "Votes can readily be moved from one column to another .... without being detectable."
California and West Virginia are the only two states that have a statutory requirement for random manual vote tallies, according to Bowen.
"I added requirements for additional manual tallies of 10 percent of precincts in any contest where the margin of victory is less than one half of one percent," Bowen said. If there is a problem with the scanning software for any reason additional audits can be done, she added.
VIDEO: Bowen tells CNET News what system will be used in the November elections and why she thinks it is better than relying on electronic voting systems that use paper trails.
It is pretty much agreed that electronic voting systems need to provide a paper receipt for auditing, but what if instead the electronic voting system printed out a unique ballot that could be scanned and tallied before the voter left the polling station?
On Thursday Alan Dechert, president and CEO of the Open Voting Consortium, Brian J. Fox and Parker Abercrombie of The Okori Group, and Brent Turner, met with CNET News and offered a peek at a different kind of electronic voting system to be demonstrated live at this year's LinuxWorld in San Francisco.
Currently private companies provide electronic voting machines and services throughout the country, among them Premier Elections Solutions (formerly Diebold) and Sequoia Voting Systems. But doubt exists about the accuracy of these systems, in part, because the companies refused to allow third-party scrutiny. In 2007, the California Secretary of State Debra Bowen instituted a third-party review of the electronic voting systems used in the state and found various irregularities. In 2004, former California Secretary of State Kevin Shelly decertified several voting systems under increasing concerns over the integrity of those systems.
The Open Voting Consortium advocates the use of open-source tools to provide election officials with accurate electronic voting systems, systems they say will save countries nearly 90 percent of the cost of current electronic voting machines. They are currently concentrating their efforts within California. They hope to announce soon adoption by at least one large county in the state and perhaps be in a position to provide services to the entire state in time for the 2012 presidential election.
The Okori Group has designed a Web-enabled service for county officials to create their ballot design, with templates for multiple candidates, yes or no propositions, and other contests likely to appear in an election. Drawing upon a database of eligible local candidates and issues, an election official creates a ballot with the Okori Group's online tool.
Dechert said that the Open Voting Consortium system would allow for unique read-only discs to be burned for each machine within each precinct and ward. The local poll worker would load the bootable disc into a special computer and printer hybrid that is yet to be designed.
For the purposes of the demonstration at CNET, Dechert used a laptop and an inkjet printer. But what Dechert envisions is a touch-screen tablet PC physically attached to an inkjet printer with a single DVD-drive. He envisions such a machine costing around $400 to produce, and said that a production model could also be offered to consumers as well.
To vote, a person would use the touch-screen to make selections, as is the case with conventional electronic voting systems.
The difference, said Dechert, is that the machine would print out the final choices along with a unique bar code. The paper ballot would then be inserted into a sleeve with only the bar code exposed.
An election worker would then scan the bar code to record the vote. At the end of the election or at choice points during the day, a tally sheet could be printed, also with a barcode. The barcode uses Open Source PDF-417, a standard that is also used in identification cards and inventory systems and can be read by most scanners. Within the two-dimensional bar code is a numerical-coded sequence that shows how a person voted. There is also a unique identifier so that the ballot cannot be counted a second time. The printed ballot cannot be linked with a specific person, but the ballot can be associated with the electronic tally stored in the computer.
Dechert says his system is better because it doesn't use fancy cryptography, it uses a simple chain of custody.
Once the bar code has been scanned, the vote entered, the paper ballot is put into a box. Later the paper ballots can be tallied if need be.
Attendees at this year's LinuxWorld will have the opportunity use this open-source voting system to cast a mock ballot for the 2008 presidential election. They'll also see first-hand how the votes are tallied every half hour and made available for recount using this system. LinuxWorld will take place August 4-7 at San Francisco's Moscone Center.
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