California voting
Last week, California Secretary State Debra Bowen decertified most of the electronic voting machines in the State of California.
Ms. Bowen is a moron.
Imagine a bank testing its security by giving the "Red Team" a key to the bank, the bank's security codes and the combination to the vault and being shocked that they were able to steal money.
That's roughly what Bowen did in order to "prove" that "hackers" (I suspect she wouldn't know a hacker if one came up and bit her in the butt) could steal an election.
As Diebold Election Systems stated [PDF Document]:
Secretary Bowen's top-to-bottom review was designed to ignore security procedures and protocols that are used during every election. Her team of hackers was given unfettered access to the equipment, the source code, and all other information on security features provided by DESI to the Secretary of State's office. And she refused to include in the review the current version of DESIs touch screen software with enhanced security features.
If you give someone the keys to your car, don't be surprised when the thing gets stolen.
My first thought when I heard this news was that this was some clever plot by the Bush adminsitration to stay in office by foiling elections across the nation, starting in California.
/remove left-wing wacko hat
On a more serious note, this odd luddite belief that somehow paper ballots are more trustworthy and a more difficult system to cheat is stupid -- the 2000 Florida recount with its dimpled chads and one- vs. two- versus three-corner attached chads should've put that to a rest. The gubernatorial election in Washington State in 2004 -- with King County's canvassing board making sometimes insane judgements on "voter intent" should've convinced us that optical scan ballots aren't the solution.
I've used the e-voting machines here in San Diego County and they're great. The advantage of electronic voting is that something is a vote or it isn't. It's binary, It's 1 or 0. There's not a question of whether or not the voter meant to vote for the candidate with the filled-in bubble or the one with the "X" in the bubble. There's no danger of overvotes -- the computer won't let you. And the voter is prompted multiple times on undervotes -- so those non-votes are made by choice also.
Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters noted that after running a campaign based largely on scaremongering over this issue that Bowen talked herself into a corner where she had to do this.
After Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Republican Bruce McPherson as secretary of state, he certified the electronic machines. Democrat Bowen, then a state senator, made it a cornerstone of her campaign against him. She alleged the machines, especially those made by Diebold, didn't offer sufficient security. Among other things, Bowen included items about electronic voting on her Internet site and aired a campaign ad showing thieves stealing a voting machine.
Whether heartfelt or opportunistic, her position reflected the "black box" paranoia that had developed on the fringe left about Diebold's touch-screen machines, with conspiracy theorists alleging that they were used to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to President Bush in 2004. It's somewhat akin to -- and about as rational as -- those who worry about an invasion of space aliens in flying saucers.
Having raised fears about voting security in the campaign, Bowen could hardly ignore it after taking office. However, she insisted in an interview with Bee columnist Dan Weintraub after the election that she didn't want to abandon electronic voting but make it safer and more user-friendly.
This year, Bowen commissioned a "red team" from the University of California to test electronic voting systems. The team found them to be vulnerable -- which is not surprising, given the less-than-reasonable, unrealistic circumstances of the tests. Among other things, the hackers were supplied with source codes and other confidential information, and they ignored the security procedures that election officials employ.
The sad thing is, that for a party that vows to "count every vote" this move back to paper ballots will have the opposite effect. They've set up a boogeyman in electronic voting systems that will allow some devious Karl Rove-type hacker to steal elections, yet that possibility is so small as to be almost non-existent. This February, thousands of votes will be tossed out because the voter didn't understand how to properly fill in a bubble or because they voted for too many candidates.
If you really want to increase voter participation, you should stick with the electronic voting.
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Actually, Debra Bowen was right on many counts, and your analogy to the bank is flawed. I say this, as someone who works in the election equipment business. The vulnerabilities exist, and Debra Bowen didn't need to hand out source code or system documentation to make it possible. With very little planning, I could change the vote counts in almost any precinct that uses electronic voting.
If you actually read the red team reports, you find a complete disregard for basic security processes and procedures. All of the systems currently in use in California exhibited these problems to various degrees. Furthermore, they found sloppy coding that leaves the systems vulnerable to any number of attacks. This is not to say that such attacks have happened, but these things are clearly possible.
In recent years, various DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machines have shown up on eBay and elsewhere. Given that the database and administrative passwords have been found to be hardcoded into the systems, it's not unreasonable to think that someone (whether they were party-aligned, or working for a vendor that wants to discredit a competitor) could quite easily manipulate the results. Giving the red teams access to the systems the way she did simply saved time. It did not represent an unrealistic scenario.
At the same time, it's valid to note that DREs (and other electronic devices) can eliminate the ambiguity of counting hand-marked paper ballots. My personal preference is a system the machine marks paper ballots (with options to meet the needs of those with disabilities), and then counts them optically. A second-best alternative is hand-marked for the general population, and machine marking to assist voters with disabilities.
In either case, there needs to be statistically significant sampled recounts, with bi-partisan supervision of the counting, as a mechanism to check for irregularities. Unfortunately, no such system, and no such appropriately sampled recounts, currently are in place.
Tim
P.S. As for your filing this under "Democrats" and "Idiots," I should point out that I've been registered as a Republican since I was 18 (I'm 47 now). The Democratic party has no stranglehold on idiocy.
Thank you Tim for so eloquently backing Secretary of State Bowen's decisions and actions. After two stolen presidential elections, the second in large part through Dibolt DRE's, we need as many people as possible standing up for honest elections and supporting those who seek to make them so. As Stalin said, it is the vote counters who count.
Kristin,
Please note that repeating a falsehood many times does not make it true. The last two elections were not stolen unless you have evidence that has never been seen to support such a claim, evidence that, in fact, maybe only you possess. You are certainly entitled to your opinion but please don't present something as fact without proof. If if helps you get through each and every angry day believing what you wrote, then by all means go for it. But let's not waste everyone else's time with such fanciful notions.
Bruce, I certainly acknowledge that some hanky-panky could occur with electronic voting machines. However, the odds of this sort of thing happening -- and happening in a way that would be undetectable -- is far less likely than with punchcard or optical-scan ballots. I believe it was John Fund's book "Stealing Elections" that suggested there was a reasonable possibility that some poll workers in Florida had managed to create votes for Gore -- and invalidate votes for other candidates -- simply by taking a straightened paper clip and ramming it through the box for Gore. If the voter didn't vote for anyone (or voted for Gore) it counted as a Gore vote. If the voter voted for anyone else, it turned their ballot into an invalid overvote.
E-voting machines can be compromised -- but I doubt that it can be done in such a fashion that makes it undetectable. Even the recent Venezuelan election, which used these machines -- and without the kind of bipartisan watchdogging and oversight that would occur in American elections -- scientists were able to determine that there was a 99.9 percent chance that the vote was rigged.
I would also note that, at least in San Diego County, the e-voting machines we use have a paper backup. During the 2006 election, I watched that closely to make sure the printed version matched the electronic version. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I somehow doubt that the "red team" managed to defeat that safeguard. I also know that I'm not the only person who checked the paper copy -- I bet you Kristin did too.
In the end, here's where I come down on this issue, and Bruce, feel free to tell me how far we've got to go to reach this place.
Are e-voting machines -- and the other security safeguards that county registrars have implemented enough to stop all but the most well-informed and tech-savvy conspirators?
Bruce, could you change the vote totals by walking into a precinct without anyone being the wiser? Could you do it so it would be undetectable afterwards? With the paper backup?
Or would you have to have access to or break-in to the county registrar's office to work with the machines beforehand? Or a precinct supervisor's home?
Or can you just sit at home in your PJs and do all this over the Internet?
If this can't be done by fewer than a handful of people, then the conspiracy is too big and it would be found out.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for continually increasing the security on these machines, and I don't doubt that there are flaws today.
What I worry about is what I'll call the San Diego Union-Tribune syndrome. The U-T is the last paper in America that still prints out stories as galleys, slaps wax on the back and has people cut it into pieces with X-acto knives so it can then be pasted up on boards. They've been waiting for decades for the "perfect" pagination system -- not realizing that such a system does not, and will never, exist.
I don't want us to be still using punchcards and optical scan ballots when I'm 65 because the Secretary of State says the systems are still vulnerable. Any system is going to be vulnerable -- it's a question of degree. Heck, every computer OS is vulnerable. (Mac OSX and Linux users like to say their's isn't -- but they are, there are just so few users of those OSs that virus programmers don't bother attacking those systems.)
I'd like to see a "red team" try to change the vote totals without anyone detecting it outside of a lab situation. Make them break into a building to get at the vote machines. Give them whatever information that is out "in the wild" and see if that helps them. I want to know how they would do this in a real-world situation -- and how likely they are to succeed.
Kristen, remember, President Bush is behind this. He's going to cancel the 2008 elections because there won't be any "approved" voting systems in this country. Secretary Bowen -- a Democrat -- is really a GOP plant.
Two things:
One: I wish people would quit acting like paper ballots are as pure as the wind-driven snow when it come to voter fraud, their not, never were, and no solution will ever be perfect, the question to ask, "is this better than what we now have?" not perfect, only better.
Second: After looking at some of the replys and noting that this woman was an elected official, do we really want to encourage people to vote?