25 October Elections and Voting

Punch Card Machine Punch cards stacked here Punched here

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?

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

Exploring e-government Federal: State: County: City:

Electronic voting: What 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?

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

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

Major concerns raised Correctness Certification process Digital divide System set up Auditing (recounts) Accessibility Internet vulnerability

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

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

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

System Set Up Lack of local technical skills Large number of local polling stations Short set up time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Denial of Service Attacks Prevents people from getting at a server Particularly problematic when there’s 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

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 serverClient/serverReal client

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

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

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

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

New North Carolina Law Let’s try to find it Hints: House Bill 238 and Senate Bill 223 Title: Public Confidence in ElectionsPublic Confidence in Elections

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

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