Vending machine democracy

July 25th, 2003 | the commons

Finally, some mainstream US attention to the story which Scoop.com, a New Zealand-based web news site and Bev Harris, author of the soon-to-be-published “Black Box Voting“, have been writing about for quite a long time.

The New York Times, Reuters, MSNBC, C|Net, The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post are all running stories about the flaws discovered in the Diebold Election Systems electronic voting machines. The flaws were discussed in a paper released yesterday by three researchers at Johns Hopkins University.The report does not mince any words, stating in the paper’s abstract:

Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered without the source code.

But the morons just don’t get it. Hundreds of well-known computer science professors and researchers have voiced their concerns about paperless voting machines. The most basic issue is that there is no way to verify that the votes cast are the same as the votes recorded. To prove that the people who are responsible for implementing these systems don’t get it, we have this quote from David Heller, project manager for voting systems with the Maryland State Board of Elections:

Heller points to a recount in Allegany County, where electronic machines were used. “We printed out all ballot images to verify the unit did tally correctly. There were no variances,” he said. “That gives the system more credibility. The results of the recount speak for themselves.”

The most basic problem is that they recounted the voting computer’s record of the ballot images and compared it against the voting computer’s tally of the vote. Great verification! And, without a paper trail, how do they know that the ballot images recorded by the computer are the same as the ballots cast by the voters? Say I cast my vote for Howard Dean. The computer shows me a ballot image which shows a big checkmark next to Dean’s name. I press the “Record My Vote” button and walk out of the booth confident that my vote counts. But, suppose that the machine has been programmed by an evil Republican, and after I press the button, it switches my Dean vote to a Bush vote, records a copy of the ballot image and adds my vote to the tally. When Bush wins my heavily Democratic district by a landslide, Mr. Heller and his crew come in, press a couple of buttons, and inform us that the computer agrees with itself. Recount over. Thanks for participating in democracy! It’s great to live in ~~Saddam’s Iraq~~ Bush’s America.

Unfortunately, Mr. Heller is the point-man in the State of Maryland’s recent purchase of US$55 million worth of Diebold’s flawed voting machines. Come next March’s primary election, us Marylanders will be entrusting the most important part of our democracy to the same sort of folks who brought us Enron & Tyco.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco told the Baltimore Sun “This is no way to develop vending machines, let alone voting systems… This is our democracy we’re talking about. There is an extra onus to ensure people have confidence in their votes.”

But, perhaps Ms. Cohn is being too naive about the true goals and objectives of this money-soaked political arena: maybe voting machines are just vending machines.