Dave Johnson, Speak Out California.

I have been looking at the issue of computerized voting machine security for several years, and want to write about it today.

Many people have pointed out that there are a number of problems with the new touch-screen voting machines.  They fear that these machines can be used to rig an election. Others feel more confident about the machines because they are “hi-tech” and computerized and make voting easier.

Computer experts warn that the machines cannot be trusted.  Meanwhile, I have a relative who believes that computers can’t make mistakes, so these machines will guarantee accurate vote counting.

I can give you my position on these machines in just a few words:  “Prove it.”  Here is what I mean:  The standard for trusting the results of an election should be based on what an average citizen can believe about the election results.  If the election system that you set up is able to prove to an average citizen that the election results are accurate, then you have the right system in place.   Elections are about average citizens making decisions and trusting the results, not about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be. The whole “trust me” thing hasn’t worked out so well in the past so people came up with “prove it” systems so everyone could see for themselves how the elections turned out.

Yes, I have an election system in mind that meets the “prove it” requirement.  It’s simple.  I say that it simply doesn’t matter what kind of machine (or no machine at all) is used in the voting booth or to count the votes later, as long as the voter can put a printed ballot in a ballot box.  (The voter, of course, is expected to look over the printed ballot to be sure it has the right candidates and ballot measures marked.  Just like with the old pen or punch card systems.)

Everyone understands printed ballots with marks on them, and putting the ballot into a ballot box.  Time-honored methods for holding secure “prove it” elections with ballots have been worked out.  At the start of the election day you check the ballot box to be sure it is empty.  Each voter gets one ballot, marks it, and puts it in the box.  At the end of the day the ballots are counted and the total is reported.  Etc.  I work in elections and I know the system well.  It can be trusted.

If we use touch-screen computers as input devices to help the voter mark the ballot, all the better.  This helps prevent mistakes like those in Florida in 2000.   When the voter is ready the machine prints out a ballot with clear markings of the voter’s choices.  After the machine prints that ballot it doesn’t matter if the machine has been hacked or is just making mistakes because you look at the ballot before putting it into the ballot box.  And it doesn’t matter how the count is reported because once you have a printed record of each voter’s intentions, you can count them by hand if necessary.  The voters or a trusted representative can watch the counting.  

There is one safeguard that I think is very important.  You must randomly test the reported vote counts against the paper ballots they are said to represent.  And I am very strict about this part.  If the count is off by even a single vote it means something is wrong with the counting system and the entire election needs to be counted by hand!

The controversy about touch-screen voting machines started because they do not use printed ballots that can prove the election’s results to the average person!  The machines come from private companies.  Some of these prohibit anyone – even election officials – from knowing how they count the votes.  There is no way at all to check whether the machines are reporting correct results.  It is a matter of trusting these companies and not of proving to the average voter that the results can be trusted.  We are just supposed to trust that the companies are telling us who won the elections!   Remember what I said about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be?

If these machines make mistakes or just break down, there is no way to figure out who really won the election.  And if someone is able to rig the machines to change the vote counts, there is no way to know that, either.  History tells us that this is a concern.  People have gone to great lengths to rig even local elections.  So with the huge stakes in today’s election — trillions of dollars and wars — we certainly should understand that highly-skilled and well-funded attempts to dictate election results are likely to occur.

There are a number of ideas for making voting machines more reliable and harder to hack into and change results.   One idea is that the public should be able to examine — and experts allowed to repair and improve — the source code for the programs used in the machines.  This is called “open source” and the Open Voting Consortium has done a lot of great work in this area. (Send them some a few $$ to help their effort.)  Open-source systems will help make the machines more reliable and easier to use and will reduce the chances that someone can try to rig an election.  This is a great approach, but in the end it fails the “prove it” test.  The average person doesn’t understand the complicated programming involved.  And there is no way to prove that the open-source code is the code that is actually running in every single voting machine on election day.  

Other ideas involve elaborate security to test and guard the machines.  This again fails the “prove it” test.  Unless average people can see for themselves that the results are accurate, no security is sufficient.

I say that the system I describe above — involving a paper ballot that the voter can check and put in a ballot box — makes the reliability and security of any voting machines themselves less important because you can “prove it” by counting those paper ballots. You can test a sample of ballots against the reported counts, making it useless to try to hack the voting or counting machines themselves.  

California’s Secretary of State Debra Bowen understands these issues and is working hard to make sure that our state’s elections are safe, fair and provable.  Let’s hope that the rest of the states can catch up to California.

Click through to Speak Out California.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen is taking it to unscrupulous voting machine vendors, after having completed her investigation into the illegal sale of thousands of machines that were not certified for use in California.  ES&S would be on the hook for millions if this suit is successful.  Chron:

“ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught,” Bowen said in a statement after filing suit against the company. “I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voting system vendor come into the state, ignore the laws and make millions of dollars from California’s taxpayers in the process.”

Bowen’s decision could be a windfall for the affected counties. In the suit, the secretary of state is seeking a $10,000 penalty for each of the uncertified machines sold in the state, with half that fine intended to go to the counties that bought them.

ES&S also would have to reimburse the counties for the full cost of the machines, but the counties would be able to keep the AutoMARKs, which are now slated to receive full state certification in early December.

The reimbursement rule was added to the state election code in 2004 in an effort to boost the penalties against companies that ignore the state’s certification rules, Bowen said.

Bowen is simply enforcing existing laws.  I am sure the counties would not mind a few extra million dollars.

“I was surprised to see this happen,” Bowen said in a telephone conference call Monday afternoon. “I hope this will be the last time I have to use (the new penalties).”

The threat of the penalties was clearly not enough to dissuade the voting machine companies from selling non-certified machines.  Perhaps the actual paying of the fines will ensure they follow California law.

At a hearing last month in Sacramento, company officials argued that because only minor changes had been made to the original AutoMARK, there was no need to get the upgraded version certified.

By reporting the changes last year to an independent federal testing authority, which agreed that only minimal modifications had been made, the company met its state reporting requirements, Fields said.

But Bowen said there is no ambiguity in the law.

“Changes … must be submitted to the secretary of state before a voting machine can be sold or used in California,” she said. “California law doesn’t ask the manufacturer to decide whether the changes are small or large or medium-size.”

California only learned about the changes when an ES&S representative inadvertently mentioned the new version of the AutoMARK in a telephone conference call with state election officials. The company never even mentioned to the state or the five counties that changes had been made to the machines that were shipped, Bowen said.

The United States has a federal system of government.  Companies do not get to pick and choose which laws they have to follow.  The actions of ES&S were deceitful and illegal.  And now there is a strong tenacious Secretary of State going after them.  Go Debra Go!

(now available in orange)
Brian has the press release, but WIRED brings us a few more intriguing details about the machines ES&S sold a group of counties before they were certified.  First of all, there were 1,000 machines sold to San Francisco, Marin, Solano, Merced and Marin.  The law allows the state to fine the company up to $10,000 per uncertified system ($9.72m) and refund the counties all or part of the purchase price, which would amount to about $5 million.  Plus, the state could ban ES&S from doing any business with the state.  That could effect up to 14 more counties, including LA County.

It turns out that ES&S may have been faking certification stickers on the back of the machines, the image is from the WIRED article.

The AutoMark A100 was certified for use in California in August 2005. However, in 2006, ES&S, by its own admission, sold 1,000 units of its subsequent AutoMark model — the A200 version — to five CA counties months before the system passed federal qualification testing in August 2006. Voting machines generally undergo two stages of testing and certification, first by independent testing labs overseen by the federal government and then by the states themselves. But according to secretary of state spokeswoman Nicole Winger ES&S still has not submitted the A200 system to the state to examine and certify.

Winger also says that the A200 machines had stickers on them (see photo below) that identified them as having passed federal qualification testing, when they hadn’t yet passed that testing. Winger says that the qualification stickers that were placed on the A200 machines were the stickers that are supposed to apply only to A100 machines. Winger says it’s possible that the stickers were applied in error. But if ES&S deliberately placed the stickers on the machines it could suggest a deliberate attempt on the part of the company to deceive California election officials.

“We are in the early stages of learning about the facts,” Winger told me. “We don’t know who would have applied the A100 stickers to uncertified equipment.”

Winger said the differences between the A100 and A200 systems are significant and easily identified just through visual inspection (see the photos above at right). The size of the motherboard and the types of wiring inside the machines are just two examples of the differences.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen will be addressing this and other questions at the hearing on September 20th.  I feel confident in saying that if her predecessor had been in office this would have never been uncovered.  Indeed, this happened under his watch.

States had several years after the Help America Vote Act passed to purchase new technology for voting.  It was at that time good government organizations started raising the warning flag about the security of many of the voting machines that companies like Diebold were marketing to county registrars.  Nobody really knew how secure they were, but the mere fact that they were operating on a Microsoft Operating System raised a lot of red flags.  Registrars were cautioned at the time to slow down and really examine what they were purchasing.  After all, the machines were not cheap.  Quite frankly, I believe it was a major flaw in the bill that it did not require the states to be in charge of the purchasing rather than the local registrars.  The patchwork system is coming back to bite us in the rear.

By and large they did not heed that call.  Now, several years down the road somebody actually did a real security test on the machines and low and behold they are not secure at all.  Secretary of State Debra Bowen did what she pledged to do in the campaign and the results of the top to bottom study left her with little chance but to decertify many of our voting machines, at least temporarily.

That is all a long way of saying that I am not exactly sympathetic to the whining coming out of the registrars about the costs of Bowen’s move.  She moved with all deliberate speed and the complaints that this is a last minute move ring hollow.  The registrars should have known this was coming and planned for this occurrence when Bowen took office. We are still six months out from the election and machines still have the opportunity to be re-certified.

I have absolutely no problems with the state spending more money to ensure votes are counted correctly.  It is the underpinnings of our entire system of government.  A couple million dollars more and a bit of a delay and hearing the returns is well worth ensuring everybody’s vote are recorded accurately and nobody is able to infiltrate the system is more than worth it.

This post was prompted by these two articles. “Voting-machine costs add up” and “E-voting changes to hit county hard“.

Debra Bowen is doing what we elected her to do.  After her top-to-bottom review of the voting systems in California revealed serious flaws, she acted:

In a dramatic late-night press conference, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified, and then recertified with conditions, all but one voting system used in the state. Her decisions, following her unprecedented, independent “Top-to-Bottom Review” of all certified electronic voting systems, came just under the wire to meet state requirements for changes in voting system certification.

Bowen announced that she will be disallowing the use of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems made by the Diebold and Sequoia companies on Election Day, but for one DRE machine per polling place which may be used for disabled voters. The paper trails from votes cast on DREs manufactured by those two companies must be 100% manually counted after Election Day. DREs made by Hart-Intercivic are used in only one California county and will be allowed for use pending security upgrades.

The InkaVote Plus system, distributed by ES&S and used only in Los Angeles County has been decertified and not recertified for use after the company failed to submit the system source code in a timely manner to Bowen’s office. LA County is larger than many states, and questions remain at this time as to what voting system they will use in the next election.

Read the whole thing.  Bowen is going up against some really powerful forces and needs out support.  The registrars are going to scream holy hell about this, and we’ll hear that we don’t have the money to up and change everything now.  That dog shouldn’t hunt.  I think everyone in this state, or at least a vast majority, is willing to pay for the security of our democracy.

One of the issues Secretary of State Debra Bowen campaigned on was voting security.  She promised to conduct a top to bottom review of our voting machines to determine if they were secure against hackers.  Bowen commissioned a report by UC researchers that gave them the opportunity to hack into the state’s voting machines to find vulnerabilities.  The initial report from the researchers was just released minutes ago.

Surprising no one, the researchers found serious vulnerabilities in all the of the machines.  I am just starting to read through the report myself, and I am sure BradBlog is going to be a great resource.  However, comb through the reports and let’s dig into them before the media gets to them.  It’s in PDF form and broken down into an overview and each of the individual companies.

(x-posted at dkos)
This article made my heart skip a beat (hattip to Chris Bowers at Mydd.com)

With Democrats controlling Congress, Rep. Rush Holt says he’s optimistic about achieving his longstanding legislative priority this year — requiring electronic voting machines to have paper backups so election results can be verified.

Yes folks, that’s right.

A total of 222 House Democrats and Republicans co-sponsored a similar bill Holt introduced in the previous Congress, when Republicans were in the majority, but it went nowhere. The legislation is widely expected to become law, with Democratic leaders tending to favor requiring a paper trail, analysts say.

A dirty little secret of the last congress it that Holt’s bill had enough support to pass, but Hastert would never let it onto the floor for an uppadown vote. We have a real chance to end these voting machine problems ONCE AND FOR all…

I agree with Chris when he said this today:

Whether or not you think election fraud has occurred via paperless DRE’s, the fact is that quite a few people don’t have confidence that their vote is counted accurately. According to Pew, only 39% of voters are “very confident” that votes are counted accurately nationwide. Among African-Americans, 18% are “not at all confident” that votes are counted accurately nationwide. This lack of trust in the political system can lead to significant voter retrenchment, which is bad both for progressives and for democracy.

And as a long time advocate of Verified Voting, (longer then I care to admit), all I have to say to that is: PREACH IT BROTHER!

I’ve written many, many, many diaries on Verified Voting, the dangers of centralized tabulation, GEMS and whatever else, i’ve written until my fingers felt like they were going to fall off.

I can’t think of any other issue that would give me greater pleasure then putting this business to rest immediately and for good, and THIS BILL WOULD DO THAT.

We are lucky here in California that some of our fine elected representatives, especially Senator Boxer have been major leaders in Verified Voting, but it never hurts to put the pressure on for truly bipartisan democracy saving measures such as this.

So take action now:
Use PFAW’s action item link to e-mail your rep about this now!

For the sake of party unity, for the sake of fair and clean elections, for the sake of Democracy itself.

-C.

update: found a list of co-sponsors…
hat tip to verifiedvoting.org

By Mr. HOLT (for himself, Mr. TOM DAVIS of Virginia, Mr. WEXLER, Mr. EMANUEL, Mr. PETRI, Mr. WOLF, Mr. LEWIS of Georgia, Mr. LANGEVIN, Mr. COOPER, Mrs. JONES of Ohio, Mr. CLAY, Mr. SHAYS, Ms. KAPTUR, Mr. ENGLISH of Pennsylvania, Mr. HASTINGS of Florida, Mr. RAMSTAD, Mr. MEEK of Florida, Mr. ISSA, Mr. CUMMINGS, Mrs. BIGGERT, Ms. LEE, Mr. CASTLE, Ms. KILPATRICK, Mr. KUHL of New York, Ms. CORRINE BROWN of Florida, Mr. MACK, Mr. SCOTT of Virginia, Mr. ABERCROMBIE, Mr. ACKERMAN, Mr. ALLEN, Mr. BECERRA, Ms. BERKLEY, Mr. BERMAN, Mr. BERRY, Mr. BISHOP of Georgia, Mr. BLUMENAUER, Mr. BOREN, Mr. BOSWELL, Mr. BOUCHER, Mr. BOYD of Florida, Mr. BRADY of Pennsylvania, Mr. BRALEY of Iowa, Mr. BUTTERFIELD, Mrs. CAPPS, Mr. CARNAHAN, Mr. CHANDLER, Mr. COHEN, Mr. COSTA, Mr. COSTELLO, Mr. COURTNEY, Mr. CROWLEY, Mr. DAVIS of Illinois, Mr. LINCOLN DAVIS of Tennessee, Mrs. DAVIS of California, Mr. DEFAZIO, Ms. DEGETTE, Mr. DELAHUNT, Ms. DELAURO, Mr. DICKS, Mr. DINGELL, Mr. DOGGETT, Mr. DOYLE, Mr. EDWARDS, Mr. ELLISON, Mr. ENGEL, Ms. ESHOO, Mr. ETHERIDGE, Mr. FATTAH, Mr. FILNER, Mr. FORTUÑO, Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts, Mrs. GILLIBRAND, Mr. GONZALEZ, Mr. GORDON, Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas, Mr. GRIJALVA, Mr. GUTIERREZ, Mr. HALL of New York, Ms. HARMAN, Ms. HERSETH, Mr. HIGGINS, Mr. HINCHEY, Ms. HIRONO, Mr. HODES, Mr. HOLDEN, Mr. HONDA, Ms. HOOLEY, Mr. INSLEE, Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas, Mr. JEFFERSON, Ms. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON of Texas, Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia, Mr. KAGEN, Mr. KENNEDY, Mr. KILDEE, Mr. KIND, Mr. KLEIN of Florida, Mr. KUCINICH, Mr. LANTOS, Mr. LARSEN of Washington, Mr. LOEBSACK, Mrs. LOWEY, Mrs. MCCARTHY of New York, Ms. MCCOLLUM of Minnesota, Mr. MCINTYRE, Mr. MCNULTY, Mrs. MALONEY of New York, Mr. MARSHALL, Mr. MATHESON, Ms. MATSUI, Mr. MELANCON, Mr. MICHAUD, Mr. MILLER of North Carolina, Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California, Mr. MITCHELL, Mr. MOLLOHAN, Mr. MOORE of Kansas, Mr. MORAN of Virginia, Mr. PATRICK MURPHY of Pennsylvania, Mr. NADLER, Mrs. NAPOLITANO, Ms. NORTON, Mr. OBERSTAR, Mr. OBEY, Mr. OLVER, Mr. ORTIZ, Mr. PALLONE, Mr. PASTOR, Mr. PAYNE, Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota, Mr. PRICE of North Carolina, Mr. REYES, Mr. ROTHMAN, Ms. ROYBAL-ALLARD, Mr. RUPPERSBERGER, Mr. SALAZAR, Ms. LINDA T. SÁNCHEZ of California, Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California, Ms. SCHAKOWSKY, Mr. SCHIFF, Ms. SCHWARTZ, Mr. SCOTT of Georgia, Mr. SERRANO, Mr. SHERMAN, Mr. SHULER, Ms. SLAUGHTER, Mr. SMITH of Washington, Ms. SOLIS, Mr. SPRATT, Mr. STARK, Mr. STUPAK, Ms. SUTTON, Mr. TANNER, Mrs. TAUSCHER, Mr. TAYLOR, Mr. TIERNEY, Mr. TOWNS, Mr. UDALL of Colorado, Mr. VAN HOLLEN, Mr. WALZ of Minnesota, Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Ms. WATERS, Ms. WATSON, Mr. WAXMAN, Mr. WEINER, Ms. WOOLSEY, Mr. WU, Mr. WYNN, and Mr. ALTMIRE):