Record-Journal
08-25-2007, 12:13 AM
With new voting machines rolling out across the state, there will be a paper trail left behind next Election Day to verify any questionable tally, but a group that was an original proponent of the machines says that there will still be plenty of room for artifice when we go to the polls in November.
Dr. Michael Fischer, computer science professor at Yale University and president of True Vote Connecticut, says that there are several remaining tampering vulnerabilities.
True Vote Connecticut is a citizen group which has been lobbying state officials for years about the dangers of electronic voting fraud. It was a proponent of voting machines that have a paper trail, which have subsequently been purchased by the state.
Fischer described the new machines as a big improvement over ATM-style ones with no verifiable “hard copy,” but said there are still problems with the system.
One of the risks with electronic readers is that the electronic ballots, which are stored on memory cards plugged into the voting machines, can be tampered with by anyone with access, he said.
“The question that comes to mind is: How do we know that the card that’s in the machines on Election Day is correct?” Fischer said.
State officials acknowledge this vulnerability and set up a strict chain of custody to make sure the cards are not altered, Fischer said. However, he believes the cards are still very vulnerable long before they reach Connecticut. The memory cards are originally programmed in Methuen,
Mass., at LHS Associates, which sold the voting machines to Connecticut.
“How do we know the card was programmed correctly in the first place?” he asked. “Up until that point (when the cards reach Connecticut), they’re vulnerable, beginning with LHS Associates and all the hands they pass through at the company to the shipping clerk. It’s real convenient to say that once the cards have reached Connecticut they can’t be changed. Any time you have a private company that has the power to control the outcome of an election, it’s a big threat. The only way I would trust the memory cards would be if there was a publicly available way to verify the cards afterward.”
Michael Kozik, managing attorney of the Elections Division of the Secretary of the State’s office, said this isn’t a large concern.
LHS performs the same service for five New England states and has been in business 20 years, Kozik said. “It’s their livelihood,” he said. “In terms of security after it leaves their facility, it is shipped to the registrar in tamper-evident packaging. If something has been done to the card, it will be obvious once it has reached the town.”
Dr. Alec Schvartsman, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Connecticut and head of the university’s voting technology research center, which is working closely with the Secretary of the State to safeguard elections, agrees with Fisher that there is a possible vulnerability at LHS.
“That’s a valid concern, and the issue of how well we trust the people who program the memory cards for the election is important, be they a state employee or not,” he said. “The concerns are very valid and very real.”
But the real protection for the state is that law requires an audit of 10 percent of all polling places at every election, Kozik said.
However, Fisher believes these audits will not necessarily detect all fraud. In a close election, 1 percent of votes at every polling station could be siphoned off and transferred, he said, tipping the scales of the election, if the cards were programmed to do this.
He said that in the test run of the machines in November 2006, the audit that the Secretary of the State’s office conducted did not attempt to investigate several small discrepancies.
“The mindset of the people who are responsible for bringing in the machines is that they are going to operate flawlessly,” Fisher said. “They don’t want to believe that they’re not performing flawlessly, even in the face of evidence that says that they’re not.”
Concern over audits and the memory card’s ability to influence votes is valid, Schvartsman said, but because close elections now have an automatic manual recount mandated by law, the risk isn’t as great.
Kozik said all discrepancies in the audit had been traced to human error, and were not voting machine issues.
Fisher said he’d be more comfortable if there were a way to easily verify the cards, but that’s not possible currently.
LHS has so far refused to make public the formatting data for the cards, making UConn’s attempts to interpret them “educated guessing.” He also said the technology of the cards is so outdated that readers could not be found except for one on loan from a private company.
While the Secretary of the State’s office is considering spot checks of the cards once they are delivered to the state, Kozik said that checking all the cards won’t work because of the last-minute changes that are common under Connecticut law. “We are not talking about testing 1,500 memory cards,” he said. “That’s impossible.”
LHS was indeed resisting external inspection and the release of its formatting data, Schvartsman said, but he hoped that might be changing. “There’s certainly agreements that we should be getting an advance copy of the database and doing subsequent random checks,” he said.
Though he considers the lack of readers a problem, he said an inherent flaw in the software allowed his team to examine the cards to some degree. “We come through the back door,” he said. “We obtain the dump and examine it without having to use a direct hardware device.”
Schvartsman’s UConn team has discovered numerous software vulnerabilities in the voting machines, and Fisher is concerned that Diebold, the original manufacturer, is not deploying the software updates to fix these, as is being done in California. A single update given to the UConn team does not seem to fix most of the problems.
“At this point, we do not believe that the new firmware provided to the state fixes major flaws in the machine,” Schvartsman said. “The evaluation is still in progress, but if it does not fix major problems, I don’t know that it’s a good idea to upgrade just to have the newer version.”
He said updates in California seemed to fix some of the issues, and his team was in contact with the Californian efforts to patch up the vulnerabilities. “I’m somewhat skeptical that Diebold will fix all of the problems (in time for the election),” he said.
In Cheshire, which has already received the new machines, the registrar’s office said it has confidence in the accuracy. Betsy Adams, the Republican registrar of voters, said that the office’s checks safeguard against memory-card fraud. “We have a lot of control over them,” she said. “We have to do a long process to make sure its counting how it’s supposed to be. We make sure that that ballots are reading how we’re inputting them.”
While Schvartsman did not call the elections absolutely secure, he did say considerable progress is being made.
“What I can say with certainty is that for each election, we here in Connecticut are tightening the security measures,” he said.
“I would also cite Connecticut as being one of the few states in the country where the secretary of state’s office is cooperating with an independent organization like ourselves. I don’t think we can have perfection in one year, or even two, but I know that we’re on track for making each election more secure.”
Dr. Michael Fischer, computer science professor at Yale University and president of True Vote Connecticut, says that there are several remaining tampering vulnerabilities.
True Vote Connecticut is a citizen group which has been lobbying state officials for years about the dangers of electronic voting fraud. It was a proponent of voting machines that have a paper trail, which have subsequently been purchased by the state.
Fischer described the new machines as a big improvement over ATM-style ones with no verifiable “hard copy,” but said there are still problems with the system.
One of the risks with electronic readers is that the electronic ballots, which are stored on memory cards plugged into the voting machines, can be tampered with by anyone with access, he said.
“The question that comes to mind is: How do we know that the card that’s in the machines on Election Day is correct?” Fischer said.
State officials acknowledge this vulnerability and set up a strict chain of custody to make sure the cards are not altered, Fischer said. However, he believes the cards are still very vulnerable long before they reach Connecticut. The memory cards are originally programmed in Methuen,
Mass., at LHS Associates, which sold the voting machines to Connecticut.
“How do we know the card was programmed correctly in the first place?” he asked. “Up until that point (when the cards reach Connecticut), they’re vulnerable, beginning with LHS Associates and all the hands they pass through at the company to the shipping clerk. It’s real convenient to say that once the cards have reached Connecticut they can’t be changed. Any time you have a private company that has the power to control the outcome of an election, it’s a big threat. The only way I would trust the memory cards would be if there was a publicly available way to verify the cards afterward.”
Michael Kozik, managing attorney of the Elections Division of the Secretary of the State’s office, said this isn’t a large concern.
LHS performs the same service for five New England states and has been in business 20 years, Kozik said. “It’s their livelihood,” he said. “In terms of security after it leaves their facility, it is shipped to the registrar in tamper-evident packaging. If something has been done to the card, it will be obvious once it has reached the town.”
Dr. Alec Schvartsman, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Connecticut and head of the university’s voting technology research center, which is working closely with the Secretary of the State to safeguard elections, agrees with Fisher that there is a possible vulnerability at LHS.
“That’s a valid concern, and the issue of how well we trust the people who program the memory cards for the election is important, be they a state employee or not,” he said. “The concerns are very valid and very real.”
But the real protection for the state is that law requires an audit of 10 percent of all polling places at every election, Kozik said.
However, Fisher believes these audits will not necessarily detect all fraud. In a close election, 1 percent of votes at every polling station could be siphoned off and transferred, he said, tipping the scales of the election, if the cards were programmed to do this.
He said that in the test run of the machines in November 2006, the audit that the Secretary of the State’s office conducted did not attempt to investigate several small discrepancies.
“The mindset of the people who are responsible for bringing in the machines is that they are going to operate flawlessly,” Fisher said. “They don’t want to believe that they’re not performing flawlessly, even in the face of evidence that says that they’re not.”
Concern over audits and the memory card’s ability to influence votes is valid, Schvartsman said, but because close elections now have an automatic manual recount mandated by law, the risk isn’t as great.
Kozik said all discrepancies in the audit had been traced to human error, and were not voting machine issues.
Fisher said he’d be more comfortable if there were a way to easily verify the cards, but that’s not possible currently.
LHS has so far refused to make public the formatting data for the cards, making UConn’s attempts to interpret them “educated guessing.” He also said the technology of the cards is so outdated that readers could not be found except for one on loan from a private company.
While the Secretary of the State’s office is considering spot checks of the cards once they are delivered to the state, Kozik said that checking all the cards won’t work because of the last-minute changes that are common under Connecticut law. “We are not talking about testing 1,500 memory cards,” he said. “That’s impossible.”
LHS was indeed resisting external inspection and the release of its formatting data, Schvartsman said, but he hoped that might be changing. “There’s certainly agreements that we should be getting an advance copy of the database and doing subsequent random checks,” he said.
Though he considers the lack of readers a problem, he said an inherent flaw in the software allowed his team to examine the cards to some degree. “We come through the back door,” he said. “We obtain the dump and examine it without having to use a direct hardware device.”
Schvartsman’s UConn team has discovered numerous software vulnerabilities in the voting machines, and Fisher is concerned that Diebold, the original manufacturer, is not deploying the software updates to fix these, as is being done in California. A single update given to the UConn team does not seem to fix most of the problems.
“At this point, we do not believe that the new firmware provided to the state fixes major flaws in the machine,” Schvartsman said. “The evaluation is still in progress, but if it does not fix major problems, I don’t know that it’s a good idea to upgrade just to have the newer version.”
He said updates in California seemed to fix some of the issues, and his team was in contact with the Californian efforts to patch up the vulnerabilities. “I’m somewhat skeptical that Diebold will fix all of the problems (in time for the election),” he said.
In Cheshire, which has already received the new machines, the registrar’s office said it has confidence in the accuracy. Betsy Adams, the Republican registrar of voters, said that the office’s checks safeguard against memory-card fraud. “We have a lot of control over them,” she said. “We have to do a long process to make sure its counting how it’s supposed to be. We make sure that that ballots are reading how we’re inputting them.”
While Schvartsman did not call the elections absolutely secure, he did say considerable progress is being made.
“What I can say with certainty is that for each election, we here in Connecticut are tightening the security measures,” he said.
“I would also cite Connecticut as being one of the few states in the country where the secretary of state’s office is cooperating with an independent organization like ourselves. I don’t think we can have perfection in one year, or even two, but I know that we’re on track for making each election more secure.”