Politics & Society
Can We Trust the Machines?
Critics say hacker-prone software and lack of federal regulation could lead to miscounting of votes
bpd231@nyu.edu
As Chris Tengi watched his colleague conduct a security analysis on voting machines, he noticed that the key to one of them looked similar to a key he had at home.
“I’d been carrying this key around that probably opened a file cabinet or the access panel of a VAX computer some 20 years back,” said Tengi, a technician at Princeton University.
His old key unlocked the voting machine. The same key, he discovered, could be purchased online, and could unlock office furniture and hotel mini-bars.
That was two years ago. Such issues have long since been taken care of, claim manufacturers of that machine, who vouch for the reliability of new high-tech electronic voting machines.
But voting rights activists say that many other problems persist, including hacker-prone software, the absence of federal regulation and the lack of backup paper trails.
Critics of electronic voting say this might lead to the miscounting of votes in the November presidential election.
“There was an incident in the Washington, DC primary even this year, where electronic machines registered thousands of phantom votes,” said Lawrence Norden, associate counsel of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. “A smaller number might not even have been noticed.”
The “hanging chads” controversy in Palm Beach County, Florida, during the 2000 U.S. presidential elections, caused over a thousand ballots to register either too many votes, or none at all. To prevent such errors in the future, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, requiring states to upgrade their voting machines.
“The HAVA made a huge pile of money available to the vendors when it authorized the replacement of old punch card and lever voting machines, $3 billion to be exact. And the vendors scrambled to get a share of that,” said Bo Lipari, founder of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, a non-profit organization that educates people on voting and election issues.
Nor is there a federal agency that regulates the election system.
“You have the Federal Aviation Administration for airlines, and the FDA for food. But there are no standards that voting machine manufacturers have to meet, the vendors can do whatever they want,” said Susan Pynchon, executive director of the Florida Free Elections Coalition.
A study released in 2006 by the Brennan Center reported problems with electronic voting systems across the nation. Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen systems, for instance, have no accompanying paper records for verification purposes, and rely mainly on the accuracy of the software that processes votes registered on the system. At least six states will use these machines in this election.
The lack of paper trails makes it impossible to audit electronic voting machines.
“We have a law that requires the machines to be audited, but we cannot audit if there is no paper trail,” said Penny Venetis, a clinical professor of law at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, who represents a group of individuals and state legislators fighting to scrap electronic voting machines.
Norden, of the Brennan Center, believes that there has been some progress since 2006, with more states adding paper trails to their DRE touch-screen systems.
“It’s gone up from 12 to 18 states in the last two years,” he said.
Election officials are also optimistic.
“We’re not expecting problems this year,” said Mark Wolosik, division manager for the Allegheny County Department of Elections, in Pennsylvania. “We’re conducting both automatic logic and accuracy testing of the machines before the elections and parallel testing of random machines during the elections, and this is a videotaped process. I think that verifies security.”
Critics remain skeptical. “DREs do not inspire confidence in people,” said Suzanne Broughton, president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the League of Women Voters. “The problem is that you really don’t know what is in those machines.”
Experts believe that a solution to this might be allowing the public to check the software for errors. However, manufacturers and government officials insist that this is a trademark secret and that revealing the source code would be a breach of security.
“Well, it’s trademark secret versus democracy. What is more important?” asked security technologist and author Bruce Schneier.
“Officials have a fiduciary responsibility to answer to the voter,” said Rutgers’ Venetis, who is fighting a legal battle to make source code details available to the public. “There’s no point if it’s not announced to the public.”
The unreliability of these systems remains a huge issue.
“I don’t know what will happen this year,” said Broughton. “Most of the time you just don’t know what will happen. And that’s part of the problem.”
A key (top) that opened a voting machine turned out to be the same kind that opened office cabinets, and hotel mini-bars, according to a technician who made the discovery.
Photo courtesy of Chris Tengi
Chris Tengi, a Princeton University technician, discovered that keys to voting machines a colleague was checking were the same kind that opened office cabinets, and hotel mini-bars.
Photo courtesy of Chris Tengi
Vendors scrambled to get a piece of the $3 billion Congress made available to modernize voting machines, said Bo Lipari, founder of the non-profit New Yorkers for Verified Voting.
Photo courtesy of Bo Lipari