Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
An article in Arstechnica correctly points out that the Lofgren amendment to HR-811:
…significantly watered down the requirement that voting machine source code be made publicly available. Holt’s original legislation had required that source code be “available for inspection promptly upon request to any person.” The version approved by the House still requires vendors to disclose source code to an independent third party, but that third party may only disclose the source code to government officials, to parties in election-related litigation, or to a person “who reviews, analyzes, or reports on the technology solely for an academic, scientific, technological, or other investigation or inquiry concerning the accuracy or integrity of the technology.”
Even with this change to the bill we are pleased with the way the bill came out of committee. Unfortunately the lack of wording that requires paper ballots for all tallies, recounts and audits keeps us from supporting the bill. Let me be perfectly clear though; we are not anti-HR811. We are, instead, neutral and will continue our fight to ban electronic ballots from US elections.
Ed Note: The above comments represent the position of VotersUnite.org, not necessarily those of The BRAD BLOG.
For more of today’s most notable voting news stories, see all the links below…
NAtional: House waters down e-voting code disclosure rules LINK
NAtional: Paper trail bill voted out of House committee. Would such a law have prevented Sarasota? LINK
NAtional: The globalization of electronic election theft LINK
NAtional: Voting Paper Trail Requirement Clears Committee LINK
NAtional: Hand-Counted Paper Ballots: Frequently Asked Questions LINK
CA: Riverside County – Vote machine probe to start next week LINK
CA: San Diego County – BREAKING: Former Diebold, Sequoia Sales Rep Named as New San Diego County Registrar of Voters LINK
CA: San Diego County – Former Diebold Sales Rep Becomes Registrar of Voters in San Diego LINK
CA: San Diego County – County hires new registrar of voters LINK
CO: Douglas County – High school students to work Douglas elections LINK
GA: Karen Handel: Voting Rites
Georgia’s Secretary of State says providing a paper trail for electronic voting is a matter of when, not if. LINK
IL: Feds find fault with state election spending LINK
IN: Hancock County – After losing by 9 votes, candidate wants a recount LINK
IN: Marion County – Council president to reinstate investigative election committee LINK
MA: Bolton – New voting machine has assistive features LINK
PA: Bucks County – Freedom of Information LINK
UT: Salt Lake County – Special Election Means Special Expenses for Cities, Counties LINK
WV: Jefferson County – Electronic voting equipment purchase approved LINK
Canada: Montreal – City pays $300,000 to settle dispute on botched voting LINK
Scotland: Fragmented databases behind Scottish election debacle LINK
**”Daily Voting News” is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in “Daily Voting News” may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**
This bill has pissed me off since I first heard of it. Many well meaning folks have tried to amend it. Yet the more I hear about it the worse it gets. (Always I hear shitty news on May 11th)
Bottom line is if were going to count electronically , that’s it. American citizens are toast. I don’t even see the point of showing up to vote anymore. I feel like leaving my home, sell everything I own, leave this country, go and live in Central America and die in the jungle or something. I mean screw it. Screw this government and it’s bullshit! It’s illegitimate, corrupt and destroying the fucking planet~!
The various voting issue movements have done it again, like they have for 40 years. Made things worse by personality cult mentality and vague notions of the law and the facts. Another bill made worse.
The electronic voting machine (EVM) watchdogs twenty years ago were saying what was said before the committee recently (1988 Article).
You can shock the hell out of the EVM audience with these quotes from a 1988 official report:
(NIST Report 1988, bold added).
No one mentioned that even twenty years is enough to have more than “suggested rules” which are admittedly inadequate … which election war lords are ignoring anyway.
And who asked why one person certifies the machines no matter how many ITA companies claim to do the certification? Or who sets the standards of the lone ranger doing the testing (The Lone Tester)?
It appears that once again the voting rights movement related to the EVM world has noised bratty concerns to help congress fail and Diebold win again?
The only question I think remains is whether the EVM movement’s muck up will be for the last time or not. I seriously doubt that it will be.
The reference Dredd has brought forward is indeed a – maybe THE – classic, by Roy Saltman.
There was another one worth remembering: Ronnie Dugger, The New Yorker, “Annals of Democracy: Counting Votes” 11/7/88.
Here’e the link [Prof. Neumann archived it on his own site]:
http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/dugger.html
It’s really great. Here are some samples:
Dugger met Dunn and Neumann at various points. Dunn: “There are at least a half-dozen places, maybe a few less, where you could lay in a Trojan horse in that source code – lay in routines to do whatever you wanted to in an election. There’s code in that system that shouldn’t be there, is not being used, is worthless to the operation of the system. It can be replaced with anything you want it to be.”
Had Nunn found a trapdoor; that is, a place in a program where one can break down its security system and emerge undetected deep inside the program?
“Yes. There is one.”
And had he found “wait loops” in the program which conceivably could control outcomes, or “Christmas trees” – Nunn’s term for surprise packages [also called “easter eggs”]?
“They’re all there. There are wait loops there. There are routines that are not documented in the manual and, from every way I can determine, do not work.”
As we talked, Nunn got up from the couch, where he had been sitting, walked to his desk, and sat down at the Macintosh… “I’ve come up with an idea.” After about ten minutes, during which we went on with the discussion, he called me over to the keyboard and invited me to add on the computer any numbers that came into my head. I added eight and thirteen, then two multi-digit figures; the sums printed on the screen were correct. “Now,” he said from the couch, to which he had returned, “add two and two.” On the off-the-shelf program of this standard brand computer two and two added up to five. In ten minutes, before my eyes, Nunn had made a Trojan horse for me. He printed the five-step program out and gave it to me. I still have it:
10 input x
20 input y
30 if x = 2 then x = 3
40 print “The sum of x + y is”, x+y
50 go to 10
Line 30 is the Trojan horse inserted into the program that makes two and two five. “I’ve told it every time it sees the number two, replace it with a three,” Nunn said.
…
Speaking in his office at S.R.I., amid papers stacked and scattered about on his desk and the floor and a chair nearby, Neumann went on,”Even if you can look at the source code, you can’t guarantee that there’s not a Trojan horse embedded somewhere in the code. Any self-respecting system programmer can hack the innards of the system to defeat encryption techniques or any password protection, or anything like that. All this stuff is trivial to break, for the most part. In most computer systems out there, it is child’s play.
Given the fact that the underlying systems are so penetrable, it is relatively easy to fudge data – for example, to start out with three thousand votes for one guy and zero for the other before the counting even starts, even though the counter shows zero. Essentially a Trojan horse in the coding. I can do it in the operating system. I can do it in the application program. Or I can do it in the compiler. I can rig it so that all test decks work perfectly well. I program it so that, after the test is run, at, say, six-fifty-five in the evening, it simply adds thousands of votes. It would never show up. He added that having a computer count a set portion of one candidate’s votes as if they had been cast for his or her opponent would be “utterly trivial to do.”
As for stealing a Presidential election, Neumann said, “I would put in a whole variety of techniques. I wouldn’t just rely on one. You might use a different technique in each state, for example. You could trigger it so that you didn’t do anything wrong if everything was going well, and if your candidate was losing you simply add votes-and you have to subtract, too. You have to make all the consistency checks satisfy. That’s relatively easy to do.”
Neumann exclaimed, “The possibilities are endless!” He seemed to be enjoying them, but then drew back. “I think the possibilities for rigging elections with computers are enormous. I’m not going to say it’s ever been done. The point here is it’s in the hands of one very skilled programmer or somebody who understands the system.”
===
It goes on and on; I always hate to leave it…
Oddly enough, one person Dugger met was Shamos, who also obliged by showing how to subvert a system…
Dredd is right; it’s been there in plain sight all these these years and if you mention it you’re a tinfoil hat type…
ARGH!
HCPB