Digital Democracy: A look at Voting Machines

1
Digital DemocracyA look at Voting Machines

• Presented by Justin Dugger
• April 2003

2
Overview

• Technologies
• Law
• Social Issues

3
Australian Ballot

• Anonymous Vote
• Discourages Coersion
• Difficult Accountablility
• Problems
• Undervote (okay)
• Overvote (invalid)
• Fraud
• Repeat Voting
• Chain Voting

4
Mechanical Levers

• Lever operates privacy screen
• Several levers to declare votes
• Mechanical odometer that tabulate pulls
• Tampered to not register votes
• Mechanical failures 99 more frequent than 98 or
  100
• 20.7 of registered voters in the United States
  in the 1996 election used levers

5
Punch Cards

• Faster than hand count
• Paper jams, dimpled chads, hanging chads

6
Optical Mark-Sense Scan

• Scantron style ballot
• Human Readable
• Faster vs hand counting
• Uses simple computer vision techniques
• Threshold of filled pixels on bounding rectangle?

7
Direct Recording Electronic

• Records vote onto hard drive or database
• No technological need for physical ballot
• Example ADV EDGE from Sequoia
• Holds 500 votes max
• Assistance for multilingual and disabled voters
• Proprietary firmware on closed system prevents
  hacker access
• Ballots can be printed to accommodate hand
  recounts

8
The Internet?!?

• Vote online with a web browser
• Web server subject to flash crowds
• Brings up concerns as absentee ballots
• Influence
• Vote Selling
• A secure Internet voting system is theoretically
  possible, but it would be the first secure
  networked application ever created in the history
  of computers.
• -Bruce Schneier

9
Current Voting Framework

• Election laws are state legislated
• Generally proceeds
• Voter Registration
• Election Day
• Count
• Certification of Vote
• Machines often approved by Secretary of State for
  county use, who relies on ITAs.

10
Help America Vote Act of 2002

• Funded mandate to replace voting machines in
  federal elections
• Eliminates Lever and punch cards
• Sets some general guidelines for machines
• Establishes state wide voter databases
• Requires NIST to organize and develop guidelines
  for security, privacy, usability, and remote
  access

11
A Petition Against DRE

• DRE machines eliminate voter audit trails
• Endorsed by several computing celebrities
• Bruce Schneier
• Ronald Rivest, Charles Leiserson, Ed Felton
• Most of the Stanford CS faculty
• Public Policy Committee of ACM
• http//verify.stanford.edu/evote.html

12
Other Issues

• Open Source? Not likely.
• Social Engineering
• Diebold FTP was found with public access
• No Background Checks
• Felons not allowed to vote in most states
• Monopoly? ESS sold half US machines
• Buggy? VoteHere QA engineer fired, filing
  wrongful termination lawsuit

13
References

• Douglas Jones, A Brief Illustrated History of
  Voting. Course notes for Voting and Elections
  class. Accessed on April 20th www.cs.uiowa.edu/jo
  nes/voting/picture/
• Lever Voting, FEC. Accessed on April 20th from
  www.fec.gov/pages/lever.htm
• David Dill, Resolution on Electronic Voting
  verify.stanford.edu/evote.html
• David Dill, Personal Communication
• Ronnie Dugger, Annals of Democracy Counting
  Votes. November 7th, 1988. The New Yorker
  Available online at www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/
  dugger.html
• Current Recommended Standards www.fec.gov/pages/v
  ssfinal/vss.html
• HAVA www.electionline.org/site/dav/pdf/eripbrief
  32003.pdf
• Senator Hagel Controversy thehill.com/news/012903
  /hagel.aspx
• Vendors
• www.sequoiavote.com
• www.essvote.com
• www.diebold.com
• www.votehere.com
• ITAs
• www.wylelabs.com/
• www.ciber.com/
• www.systest.com/ita/index.html