25 October

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25 October

• Elections and Voting

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Punch Card Machine
Punch cards stacked here
Punched here
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US Attitudes re e-government

• Beliefs
• 45 agree that giving personal information would
  improve service
• Same percentage believe that doing so risks
  security and privacy
• Balance 54 believe that government should
  proceed slowly
• Actions
• Only 25 of e-government users use it for
  transactions
• Yet 70 execute commercial transactions
• Is this a difference in attitudes or availability?

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Homeland security

• Ability to share information
• Between federal agencies
• With local governments
• Potential benefit to terrorists
• Hacking
• More information
• National identity cards
• US citizens against
• Other countries more positive

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Exploring e-government

• Federal www.us.gov
• State www.nc.gov
• County www.co.orange.nc.us
• City www.ci.chapel-hill.nc.us

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Electronic votingWhat are the issues?

• What are the requirements for elections?
• Key ones
• Secret ballot
• Assurance that your vote is counted
• New York Times editorial (13 June 04) a vote
  for president should be at least as secure as a
  25-cent bet in Las Vegas.
• Should we be worried about possible
  manipulations?
• Did you have problems reading the article?
• What voting problems did you find?

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Voting Problems

• Ballot stuffing
• Buying votes
• Improperly marked ballots
• Under voting
• People who give up
• Over voting
• Which of these are addressed with electronic
  voting?
• Which of these are exacerbated with electronic
  voting?
• Experience
• India ended up with worse corruption problems

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What is included in e-voting

• Range of Systems
• Optically scanned paper
• Touch screen systems
• Internet voting
• All Processes (what is the weakest link?)
• Registration
• Ballot design
• Voting
• Counting of votes
• Recounts

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Major concerns raised

• Correctness
• Certification process
• Digital divide
• System set up
• Auditing (recounts)
• Accessibility
• Internet vulnerability

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Correctness

• Should code be open source?
• Belief that more eyes are valuable
• Easier to hack
• Corruption
• Vulnerability improved by open source
• Checking for errors that hackers can exploit
• Malicious changes primarily a concern of which
  version is running

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Certification process

• More than 40 states require certification
• But what does it mean?
• Need to guarantee certification of last minute
  fixes or changes not always possible
• Both California and Indiana found themselves
  using uncertified code

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Digital Divide

• More generally an e-government concern
• Intimidation
• Could become a new literacy test
• California recall
• Less than 1 missed (under voted) for yes/no
• But nearly 10 under voted in the candidate
  selection

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System Set Up

• Lack of local technical skills
• Large number of local polling stations
• Short set up time

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Auditability vs. Privacy

• Storing the full record means that someone could
  get at the information
• Acceptable in England
• Secret Ballot Act of 1872
• Requires that each ballot be tied to the voter
• Records held as a state secret

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Auditing (recounts)

• Voter Verified Audit Trail
• Print a copy
• Voter verifies
• Puts it into a ballot box
• Used for
• Routine audits (random)
• Recounts
• Problems
• Cost Australia opted out
• Training

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Why do an audit?

• If you can only identify a problem, what is the
  remedy?
• If audit can also produce the corrected results,
  more valuable

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Broward County, Florida

• special election to fill a state House seat
• victor won by only 12 votes
• 137 of the electronic ballots were blank
• Florida law requires a manual recount
• but no paper ballots
• recount isn't possible

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Are there other options?

• Code can be verified against manipulating
• Example encryption within the system
• But, needs to get into the system
• User interface is the vulnerable spot
• Assuming no program errors, can we be sure that
  people will read a screen version correctly if
  they made a voting mistake?
• Depends
• Primarily on the quality of the ballot design

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Partial Solutions

• Turnout separate track of how many people voted
• Number of votes cast should match
• Need to count abstentions
• Need to track people who quit in the middle
• Does not help to determine if the vote went to
  the right person

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Accessibility

• Florida ban on plastic templates with holes for
  use by the visually impaired because NOT
  CERTIFIED
• How do you address this problem without
  compromising privacy?
• How is it done today?
• Generally, advocates for the visually impaired
  prefer electronic voting
• Techniques to support them, primarily audio
• What about the paper audit trail?

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New Mexico this past weekend

• Only two voting machines certified by the federal
  government for disabled and non-English speaking
• Neither measures up to state law that requires
  voter-verified paper record
• Upgrade would require 1000/machine

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Internet vulnerability

• Denial of Service Attacks
• Spoofing and Man-in-the-Middle
• Lack of Control of the Voting Environment

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Denial of Service Attacks

• Prevents people from getting at a server
• Particularly problematic when theres a time
  limit
• Disrupted election in Canada in 2003
• One study 10,000 attacks in one week in 2001
• Distributed Denial of Service
• Large number of machines, called zombies or
  slaves, are used to perpetrate
• Regional attacks

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Spoofing and Man in the Middle

• Basically, insert a component between the client
  and the server
• User interacts with what appears to be a real
  server, but component in the middle can change
  votes!

Real server
Client/server
Real client
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Voting Environment

• Worms, Viruses, Trojan Horses
• Problematic if you need to have special software
  on your system
• Spyware compromises privacy

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A case study Georgia

• 2000 potpourri of voting
• 2 hand-counted paper
• 73 mechanical lever
• 17 punch card
• 67 optical scan
• 0 touch screen
• 3.5 under votes no vote cast for president
• Overall 4.4 under vote rate

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Georgia Current Status

• Complete conversion to touch screen by November
  2002
• Testing of 250,000 ballots
• Signature of code that detects modification with
  a probability of 1/10,000,000,000
• Oversight of the deployment process
• Under vote rate of less than 1
• No recount capability

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Florida (NY Times, July 15 04)

• The touch-screen voting machines intended to cure
  many of the ills of 2000 have raised a host of
  other concerns here just four months before the
  election.
• A new state rule excludes the machines from
  manual recounts
• The integrity of the machines was questioned
  after a problem was discovered in the audit
  process of some of them
• Sun-Sentinel reported that touch screens failed
  to record votes six times more often than
  optical-scans in presidential primary
• Voting rights groups filed a lawsuit last week
  challenging the recount ban
• A Democratic congressman has also sued to request
  a printed record of every touch-screen vote

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New North Carolina Law

• Lets try to find it www.nc.gov
• Hints
• House Bill 238 and Senate Bill 223
• Title Public Confidence in Elections

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Key NC Requirements

• Machine requirements
• vendor cover damages resulting from defects in
  the voting system, including costs of a new
  election
• comply with all federal requirements for voting
  systems
• include in precinct returns votes cast outside of
  the precinct
• electronic voting systems generate a paper record
  of each individual vote cast
• paper record generated by the DRE voting system
  be viewable by the voter before the vote is cast
  electronically and voter may correct any
  discrepancy
• vendor will supply source code if they fail to
  debug, modify, repair, or update the software or
  file bankruptcy
• For optical scan and direct record electronic
  voting systems, sample hand-to-eye count of the
  paper ballots or paper records of a sampling of a
  statewide ballot item in every county

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Next Area Medicine

• Impact of computers in medicine
• Two assignments (again paper)
• Precis of a procedure or device made possible by
  computers
• A website with useful medical advice