Hack the Vote?

[techs]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti..._voting_a_concern_this_election_say_watchdogs

Paperless e-voting a concern this election, say watchdogs

Nearly one in four voters in Tuesday's elections will use e-voting systems with no paper records


Computerworld - Some election watchers are expressing concern over the fact that about one in four registered voters in next week's general elections will be casting their ballots using electronic voting machines that offer no verifiable paper records.

Paperless direct-recording electronic voting systems have drawn flak in past elections for being unreliable, too hard to audit and too prone to all sorts of tampering.

Such concerns have prompted 32 states and the District of Columbia to pass laws mandating the use of voting systems that support voter-verified paper records over the past few years.

Election officials in another six states have adopted similar systems even though they are not required by law to do so.

However, six states -- Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina -- still use paperless e-voting systems statewide, according to a tally maintained by the election watchdog Verified Voting Foundation. In Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia, direct-recording electronic voting systems account for a vast majority of voting systems.

In addition, paperless voting systems are in use to varying degrees in several other states, including Kansas, where at least 40% of the vote is paperless, according to Verified Voting.

The problem with using paperless voting systems is the relative difficulty of verifying the accuracy of electronic tallies, said the watchdog group's president, Pamela Smith.

Voter-marked paper ballots that are scanned and tallied by electronic systems, along with paper copies of electronically cast votes, together give election officials a reliable way to verify the accuracy of tallies, she said. "Paper enables the properties of recounting that we need right now," Smith said.

The fact that electronic voting systems can run into technical issues and are susceptible to tampering makes the need for a paper trail all the more important, said Bo Lipari, founder of New Yorkers for Verified Voting.

In November 2006, for instance, paperless touch-screen voting machines used in a congressional district race in Sarasota County, Fla., came under intense scrutiny after 18,000 ballots didn't record a vote in a tight race that was decided by a mere 369 votes.

The incident prompted calls by lawmakers for a review of paperless e-voting systems, and for the use of systems that produced a paper trail of every vote.

Last year, California officials disclosed that they had discovered numerous software errors and data deletion functions in e-voting systems, after nearly 200 votes were deleted from the official results for Humboldt County during the 2008 presidential elections.

Over the past few years, security researchers have also reported various flaws in e-voting systems that they have claimed make the systems easy to compromise.




I thought most states got rid of paperless e-voting. It's beyond me why anyone still thinks its a good idea.

 

[manimal]

After 2000 I thought this would be fixed. After 2004 I wondered why this was not fixed. Now I think its just fixed....


When a country like Nicaragua has a cleaner election than we do we got some problems.

 

[matt0611]

I think all voting should have a paper trail. I think its fine that we have e-voting machines but they should print out a piece of paper that is verified by the voter and kept by the voting authorities. Its ridiculous in this day and age we should have any doubt about our voting system.

 

[techs]

Considering the amount of animosity between the parties in todays climate its scary to contemplate what will happen if there's a close race and there is an issue with the voting machines and no paper trail.
There literally could be violence in the streets.

 

[CycloWizard]

In the end, it doesn't really matter much whether there is a paper trail or not. If someone controls the ballots, they control the outcome of the election. This is true whether the ballot is electronic or paper. How is it any different relying on an electronic machine to reliably count your vote or getting an encoded piece of paper? In either case, you have no way to confirm whether your vote will actually be counted for the candidate you think you selected. Sometimes the illusion of reliability is worse than knowing that the system is unreliable as it may lull you into a false sense of security.

 

[werepossum]

In the end, it doesn't really matter much whether there is a paper trail or not. If someone controls the ballots, they control the outcome of the election. This is true whether the ballot is electronic or paper. How is it any different relying on an electronic machine to reliably count your vote or getting an encoded piece of paper? In either case, you have no way to confirm whether your vote will actually be counted for the candidate you think you selected. Sometimes the illusion of reliability is worse than knowing that the system is unreliable as it may lull you into a false sense of security.

To a large degree that is true. Look at Al Franken's election. Several counties reprinted ballots that were "damaged", then recounted both the original ballots and the new "replacement" ballots. Even though they admitted what they had done, the "recounts" were still used over the original tallies, giving Franken a come-from-behind win even after all votes were counted. Same thing in New Mexico in 2000, Bush is ahead after all votes have been counted - but wait! Here's a bag of five hundred Gore votes, Gore wins, election certified. Same thing in Washington state when Rossi had the governorship stolen from him. We have a remarkable complacency with election fraud.

Still, I think every election ought to be done with Scantron machines where the original ballot IS the paper trail. At least then we know an election has been stolen, whether or not we can or will do anything about it. And if we can muster the will to do something about it, then we have a clear paper trail and it become much harder to cheat, you must actually swap ballots out for plausible deniability.