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Technology

What Technology Is Used In American Voting? 15

Posted by Cliff from the tuesday-is-election-day--bleah! dept.
MonopolyM asks: "My question to the /. community is something I have been pondering for awhile. Unless you've crawled under a large rock lately you know Tuesday is election day. With this said, some voting Americans will cast their vote using a computer system. News reporters report results all day from these votes, and real-time data is fed back after the polls close. My question is simple. What hardware, software, OS, etc -- runs the voting system - and how are the voting results "securely" sent to the media? Is this information restricted? If not, what system runs the most important day in our nation for the next four years?" I've tried to shy away from election questions but this one is definitely worthy for some attention. What technology do we use to handle election day results, and can such systems be improved upon?
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What Technology is Used In American Voting? More

What Technology is Used In American Voting?

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  • There is an article about this over at technocrat [technocrat.net].

    check it out..a good (if scary) read.

  • For the end user, the instructions are (copied from the actual sheet, all caps included :)

    1. TO VOTE YOU BUST BLACKEN THE OVAL ( ).
    2. USE ONLY THE PENCIL PROVIDED. Your ballot will be counted by an optical scanner. DO NOT use any other type of pencil.
    3. DO NOT CROSS OUT - If you change your mind, exchange your ballot for a new one.
    4. AFTER VOTING - Insert your balot(s) in this ballot sleeve so that the initial box appears at the bottom.
    DO NOT FOLD THE BALLOT
  • For well over the past 10 years, punchcards have been used in Maryland (US) elections. I haven't voted today, but I doubt that this has changed.

    The actual 'booth' is like a cheap aluminum TV cart, standing about waist high. In the middle is a device similar to a desktop hole punch, above it a light, shielded by white plastic walls on three sides.

    Sometime in the mid/early 80's the old-style voting machines -- those large grey curtined mechanical calculators -- were replaced by these cheaper more mobile units.

    The punch card machines don't break, and you get to keep the bottom part of your ballot as a serialized reciept.

    I don't know if it's possible for a mere citizen to check for ballot tampering later...but it should be. It's definately possible to match up specific people with specific votes since the cards are assigned to individual voters.

    Non-partisan voting info: www.webwhiteblue.org and www.lwv.org.

    Partisan voting info: Vote Libertarian!

  • we have a big 11x17 sheet of paper, an a black marker.
    You just connect the arrows..

    Pres/VP choice 1 <== ==
    Pres/VP choice 2 <==-==
    .
    .
    Pres/VP choice n <== ==

    Pretty high tech, huh?

    --
  • I got an absentee ballot a couple weeks ago in MN, and mine was ovals to fill in - basically like the standardized tests but with a lot fewer ovals. I wonder if thats absentee vs regular ballot, or if it varies by location...
    • Pencil/pen on paper, manually read and counted.
    • Mechanical voting machines: Rows of small levers next to paper labels -- flip the lever next to the name you are voting for. A very large red lever closes the curtain behind you, and when you open the curtain with the large lever the vote is counted inside the machine and the levers are reset.
    • Mark/sense voting - pen marks on paper read by the machine which you feed the paper into.
      • Arrow marks: write a short horizontal line to complete an arror pointing at a name.
      • Oval filling: blacken in an oval next to a name.
    • Absentee ballot: If you can't go to the polling place, you can vote by mail. A ballot is sent to you and you send it back. Useful if you'll be traveling on Election Day.
    • Remote voting: Under development. One of the problems with voting away from the polling place is that it is not guaranteed to be secret. Someone can pay you to vote for someone, but they can't see how you vote at the polling place. If you can vote remotely, someone could be looking over your shoulder checking that you're voting a certain way.
  • There are no standards. Some places use high-tech electronic voting systems, others use an "X" on a slip of paper counted by legions of elderly women (I don't know why elderly women, they just seem to be the overwhelming majority of counters.)

    State Electoral Commissions oversee (in some places) County State Electoral Commissions oversee (in some places) Municipal Electoral Commissions. Voting technology can be specified at any level & are most often left to the local areas.

    Results are generally tabulated & reported via telephone calls by designated offficials to specified telephone numbers using pre-agreed-upon passwords to identify themselves with call-backs to confirm authenticity. This also varies widely with computer-based systems becoming more common but the call/password/call-back is cheap, established & reliable.

    The Press & Campaigns are notified via two methods - either they'll have a person on site at the Election Commission Office or they'll also use the call-in method using passwords.

    Furthermore as most should know by now (it's a standard news story that gets dusted off & rerun every year) a vote for US President doesn't actually mean a vote-for-the-president. Instead there's an Electoral College [about.com] making sure your Vader2000 [vaderfor2000.org] write-ins don't go anywhere. Finally not all places use Simple Majority for local elections, for example Cambridge, Mass. [cambridge.ma.us] uses Proportional Representation [igc.org] for it's local candidates.

  • Sounds like what I had back in NJ for an absentee ballot - real voting booths with levers and all on the right day, little oval if you did it earlier or couldn't be there...

    --
  • 1) Mark your ballot in pencil with an "X"
    2) Hand over to the legion of elderly women

    (really high tech isn't it?)
  • The most important technology is the ability to raise the dead from their graves so they also have the chance to vote. This technology has been advanced the most by the Democrats, especially in the Chicago area. Although the Democrats keep this technology a closely guarded secret, the Republicans may have also developed their own version.
  • The machines that tabulate votes are closed-source. The people who make these machines will not even tell you how they work. They consider it their "intellectual property" to own and keep secret exactly how the system of vote tabulation works.
  • CNN had a story this morning showing a set of voting machines with color LCD touch screens. The voter inserts a card into the machine, and then the machine guides the user through the voting process, allowing the user to touch onscreen buttons to vote.

    The anchor asked the correspondent how a write-in vote is handled, and the correspondent didn't know.

    Sorry, I don't remember where these machines were.

  • Such voting machines are currently used in Belgium. About 50% of voters use them, the rest
    just uses (red) pencils on paper ballots.

    The idea is to change entirely to electronic voting in the near future.

    Cheers,

    Erik

  • From the Risks digest [wiretapped.net]

    Date: Tue, 7 Nov 00 16:43:41 CST From: "Douglas W. Jones" Subject: Thoughts on computers in voting

    It's election day, and as chair of the Iowa State Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems, it seems like a fair time to pause and think about the state of the art.

    Over the past several years, an important trend has been evident in the voting machines that have come before our board for approval in Iowa. This is the replacement of custom-built software with off-the shelf commodity software, usually some variant of Windows and largely dependent on Microsoft Office.

    Computers in voting machines are old technology at this point, whether they're used for central count systems based on punched cards or mark sense readers, or whether they're precinct count systems based on mark sense or direct recording electronic voting machines. There are still lever machines in use, of course, but those haven't been changed in years and therefore, we don't see them coming up for examination.

    Under the current Federal Election Commission guidelines for electronic voting systems, all custom-built software is subject to examination by an independent third party. On the other hand, "industry standard components" are acceptable, as is. The FEC has no enforcement power, but the FEC guidelines have been enacted into the voting law of numerous states.

    The reason this concerns me is that we see a larger and larger fraction of the software inside the voting system becoming proprietary product of a third party and exempt from the requirement that it be available for a source code inspection. Furthermore, the size of commercial operating systems is immense, so an effective inspection is very hard to imagine!

    What threat does this present?

    If I wanted to fix an election, not this year, but 4 years from now, what I might do is quit my job at the University of Iowa and go to work for Microsoft, seeking to insinuate myself into the group that maintains the central elements of the window manager. It sounds like it might be fun, even if the job I'd need would largely involve maintenance of code that's been stable for years. My goal:

    I want to modify the code that instantiates a "radio button widget" in a window on the screen. The specific function I want to add is: If the date is the first tuesday after the first monday in a year divisible by 4, and if the window contains text containing the string "straight party", and if the radio buttons contain, at least, the strings "democrat" and "republican", one time in 10, at random, switch the button label containing the substring "democrat" with any of the other labels, at random.

    Of course, I would make every effort to obfuscate my code. Obfuscated coding is a highly developed art! Having done so, what I'd have accomplished is a version of windows that would swing 10 percent of the straight party votes from the Democratic party to the other other parties, selected at random. This would be very hard to detect in the election results, it would be unlikely to be detected during testing, and yet, it could swing many elections!

    This is just one example attack! There may be similar vulnerabilities, for example, in the off-the-shelf database packages being used for ballot storage and counting.

    I don't mean to this example to reflect any ill feelings toward Microsoft, but it is true that their software is used in the vast majority of new voting systems I've seen. This threat does not require any cooperation from the vendor of the window manager or other third party component exempt from source code inspection. All it requires is a mole, working their way into the vendor and producing code which is not detected by the company's internal testing and inspection. Obfuscation is easy, and the art of the "easter egg" in commercial software makes it very clear that huge numbers of unofficial features are being routinely included in commercially released software without the cooperation of the software vendors. (OK, I know that some easter eggs are officially approved.)

    Having said this, it is worth noting that Microsoft has indicated a preference about the outcome of today's presidential election, and there are excellent reasons to treat proprietary software produced by a partisan agency with great suspicion when it is included in a voting system!

    My conclusion? The time has come for computer professionals to press for a change to the guidelines for voting machines, asking that all software included in such machines be either open source, available for public inspection, or at least open to inspection by a third party independent testing authority. There are no technical obstacles to this! Linux, Free BSD and several other fully functional operating systems are available and will run on the hardware currently being incorporated into modern voting machines!

    But, this is not the end of the problem! How do you prove, after the fact, that the software in the voting machine is the software that was approved by the board of examiners and tested by the independent testing authority? No modern machine I'm aware of makes any real effort to allow this proof, although several vendors do promise to put a copy of their source code in the hands of an excrow agency in case a question arises.

    Doug Jones http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/

    [Note: Doug, Rebecca Mercuri is just putting the finishing touches on her PhD thesis on the subject of electronic voting, at the University of Pennsylvania. I highly recommend you contact her for a copy, which should be available very soon. For everyone else, we will announce it here when the thesis is ready. Also, my book *Computer-Related Risks* has lots of background on risks in electronic elections and what to do about them. Rebecca has carried the analysis much further than I did. Her thesis will be a very valuable contribution that significantly raises the bar as to what should be demanded, not just hoped for, plus an analysis of the residual risks that would still remain. PGN]

    --
    From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews

  • Does it exist? Would not a crash development project be a stellar opportunity for educating folks on the importance of open source models in general?

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