Princeton study shows Diebold e-voting machines can be hacked
Posted by Thomas Nephew on September 14th, 2006
Maryland voters are forced to use Diebold DRE (direct recording electronic) voting technology to cast their votes. As the Tuesday election in Montgomery County and elsewhere in Maryland showed, just organizing elections using this technology appears to overtax our state and local election officials.
But there’s an even more serious concern: without independent, voter-verified hard copies of votes, how confident can you be that votes are being counted correctly?
It’s a serious question. Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Professor Edward W. Felten of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy have just released a paper on e-voting technology, Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine:
This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.
Follow the link above for access to the full paper, an executive summary, and an FAQ page. There’s also a pretty compelling video to go with it:
Paper, voter-verified listings of votes and random audits are the minimum steps needed to help catch the kind of fraud the Princeton researchers have demonstrated how to commit.
Yes, that in turn means more things that could go wrong — printers occasionally jamming, or running out of ink or paper. But that’s the cost of doing electronic voting business, if we’re sure that’s the route we want to go. Optical scan voting (think SAT tests — fill in the oval with a #2 pencil) or a return to all-paper voting are also acceptable alternatives that are at least as good, in my view.
Let your future state legislators — in District 20, likely-to-certainly Heather Mizeur, Tom Hucker, Sheila Hixson, and Jamie Raskin (D)* — know you want voter-verified voting whether via paper printout on Diebold machines, optical scan systems, or a return to paper ballots if need be. Write your own message, send them the YouTube video, send them this post (click on the little envelope button), or give them a call. By the way, I love to get comments here; please share your e-mail with me if you’d like.
While you’re at it, let them know if you’ve lost confidence in Maryland State Board of Elections’ Linda Lamone and Montgomery County Board of Elections’ Nancy Dacek — responsible for adopting Diebold technology and for Tuesday’s snafus, respectively. (UPDATE, 9/14: OK, MoCoPolitics has a good point — wait until November 8, then off with their heads.) Those snafus were a result, I think, both of incompetence and of having an overly complex voting system in the first place. Next time it’ll be the poll books, the time after that something else.
Ms. Lamone, in particular, has been consistently and arrogantly opposed to adding voter-verified paper trails and audits to Maryland’s voting systems for years. She’s too invested in the electronic voting systems we suffered through on Tuesday. I think it’s time for her to go. (If anything, let’s not let Governor Ehrlich make her and electronic voting his issues in the upcoming election.)
Votes are the fundamental atomic units of any democracy. Yes, fixing or abandoning our current electronic voting systems will cost money. But I think it’s worth it — if we want to have confidence that we’ll be able to vote on Election Day, and that the votes we cast are the ones they count.
=====
* I’ve combined candidate e-mail addresses for my convenience, and added CC’s to state and county election boards for yours; modify as desired. — Heather Mizeur and Jamie Raskin have made voter-verified voting technology key issues in their campaigns. To her great credit, Sheila Hixson has come around to supporting it, sponsoring the model bill HB244 in the last session. (The bill won 137-0 in the Assembly before Majority Leader Mike Miller unaccountably killed it in the Senate.) I don’t know Tom Hucker’s views on this subject, but don’t anticipate he’s against ensuring votes are counted accurately. — Re other candidates: Aaron Klein sent a final e-mail message to supporters this afternoon, so he presumably doubts there are enough absentee and provisional votes for him to overtake Hixson. John Wrightson will be the single Republican candidate for a District 20 Assembly seat in the general election, but (a) he doesn’t provide an e-mail address, (b) I wouldn’t list it if he did, due to his bigoted platform, and (c) God has revealed to me that he’ll lose anyway. Raskin is unopposed for the District 20 Maryland Senate seat in November.
NOTE: as ever, consult the TrueVoteMD.org page for the latest on this topic in Maryland.
UPDATE, 9/19: Tom Hucker writes to say,
…I was the only candidate in our race to testify and lobby for HB 244, and I generated hundreds of emails and phone calls in support of it. As ED of ProgMD, I worked in coalition with TrueVoteMD, NAACP and other advocates, and was the only candidate who participated in Stan Boyd’s district meeting with Sheila Hixson at his townhouse in Dumont Oaks during the legislative session. When the coalition couldn’t get a reading on Mike Miller’s position after the bill passed the House and couldn’t get a meeting with him, I went to his office myself to get a reading on his stance (opposition).
PREVIOUSLY ON ELECTRONIC VOTING:
- March, 2004 — You should have complained before you pressed the button
- July, 2004 – “Circuits” begins electronic voting series: “newsrack” improves New York Times analysis
- December 2005 — New “Gold Standard” electronic voting bill proposed in Maryland
- January, 2006 — New Maryland “paper trail” bill gains support
- March, 2006 — Proposed Maryland law won’t gamble with our ballots — a side-by-side table comparison shows that without proposed model HB244 legislation, Maryland’s electronic voting machines are literally less sensibly administered than slot machines in Las Vegas. (Don’t tell Bob Ehrlich!)
- March, 2006 — 137-0: Maryland House wants Diebold out of 2006 elections
- September, 2006 — Electronic voting gets even less popular in Montgomery County; One election judge’s day at the polls
- …and much, much more!
Category: Post. Tags: election06, electronic voting, maryland.
Thread RSS,
Comment, Trackback.
Print This
September 15th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Was Linda Lamone appointed by Ehrlich? (or re-appointed?) Someone in Max’s comment section said she was a Democrat, and I wondered why she held the job if that’s so.
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:12 pm
OK, I should have known this and I should have answered sooner. Lamone is State Administrator of Elections. She’s a Parris Glendening (D) appointee, Maryland’s governor before Ehrlich (R). When Ehrlich was elected, the state legislature decided to make Lamone’s position Ehrlich and Republican proof by requiring an 80% vote against her by the Board of Elections, instead of making her job at the discretion of the governor like the rest of the board. Even if that 80%+ vote happened, she’d stay on until the Senate approved a successor. All from a Gazette article that has axes of its own to grind, mainly w.r.t. the Baltimore Sun, which I’ve also noticed before (”137-0:…“) with the same “not now it’ll mess up the next election” gambit the Washington Post came out with today. Blair Lee’s summation of the Lamone story seems pretty accurate: “at the prospect of a GOP governor the Democrats installed a Democratic elections-administrator for life.”
It looks to me now like even more than the voting snafus on 9/12, the fact that the whole Wynn-Edwards thing is turning into an electronic Florida may be what will undo Lamone and Miller. It certainly ought to; the only thing missing there by now is a photo of a guy looking at a voting card with magnifying glasses on. Miller also added to his woes by socking some guy in the jaw at a hearing in Calvert County the other day.
It’s almost hilarious, if these guys weren’t so infuriating. But between Wynn, Lamone, and Miller, it’s proof, if any were needed, that there are MD Dems more than capable of DeLay-like levels of chicanery and something at least strongly resembling machine politics patronage at the expense of the public good. I know, I know, that can’t come as a complete shock. And Ehrlich is no slouch at his own brand of all of that.
=====
Gazette article and an excellent overview via “jorndorff” at DailyKos, where they’re following the MD-04 Wynn-Edwards story closely, as you probably know.
September 23rd, 2006 at 3:31 pm
No, I didn’t know that. I’ve limited my web reading-writing lately to the detainee torture debacle, mostly due to being immersed offline in organizing local events for and with Jim Webb. (They were successful beyond our wildest expectations, I’m happy to say.)
Very much appreciate the background. Yet another example of the human, political truth that building in lack of accountability in a public office is a recipe for disaster.
We’ve done that with Congress by allowing the campaign finance system to turn elections into auctions.
March 16th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
[...] voting is a no-brainer compared to the hideously expensive, unverifiable, breakdown-prone, easily hacked DRE (direct recording equipment) touch screen voting machines currently in use in Maryland. If [...]