CIA Expert Decries E-Voting Security 178
ISoldat53 sends this quote from McClatchy DC:
"The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering. Appearing last month before a US Election Assistance Commission field hearing in Orlando, Fla., a CIA cybersecurity expert suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies fixed a 2004 election recount, an assertion that could further roil US relations with the Latin leader. ... Stigall said that most Web-based ballot systems had proved to be insecure. The commission has been criticized for giving states more than $1 billion to buy electronic equipment without first setting performance standards. Numerous computer-security experts have concluded that US systems can be hacked, and allegations of tampering in Ohio, Florida and other swing states have triggered a campaign to require all voting machines to produce paper audit trails."
Wow....just wow... (Score:5, Informative)
Stigall said that most Web-based ballot systems had proved to be insecure.
Really? No kidding? You don't say?
These people should read Slashdot. Seriously. We've all been saying this since 1997 or 1998 when the first stories about "Internet voting" began to appear. Nothing has improved from a security standpoint since then and we all keep saying electronic voting of any kind is too easy to tamper with unless there is a verified paper record trail.
And since most of us agree on this when most of us can't even agree on which operating system is the best for general use, which programming language is best for rapid application development, or which text editor is the best, well, that kind of says something now doesn't it?
US committed a coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 (Score:1, Informative)
In April 2002 the US committed a coup against Hugo Chavez and installed a dictator that immediately disbanded the constitution and the supreme court.
2 days later the population overwhelmingly protested, and reinstalled Chavez into power.
His approval ratings via neutral Latin American sources like Data Analysis show that the votes have been quite in line with what you would expect.
The Exit poll numbers are also much closer in line in Venezuela than even the United States (the traditional measure of decent voting)
I don't know if it's true or not, but it doesn't carry a lot of weight when the country that tried to commit a coup against a leader says that the voting was rigged.
Re:Let me get this straight ... (Score:4, Informative)
It certainly isn't credible for the group that funded a coup to then say that elections were unjust when international observers, and polling firms in the region say it was just.
Even the opposition in Venezuela considers the elections just.
Re:Maybe next... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, strictly speaking, no the CIA should not be investigating the electronic vote-rigging in the USA. The FBI would be a more appropriate agency for that, I suspect.
You've missed the point (Score:5, Informative)
The point is... how would you know?
Take a look at Black Box Voting [blackboxvoting.org] and check it out. A while back, they had a YT video where a hacker was (easily!) able to preload a flash disk with values to rig the vote without there ever being any sign of a problem by the voting machines.
Yes, this is / was Diebold, but unless we use some nice sequential hash algorithms and/or cryptography, along with a verified "clean" starting point, it's not possible to trust electronic voting machines.
Further, the problem is that verifying e-votes and e-voting machines has to be done by a professional programmer and security expert. By definition, this makes verification (and trust) basically impossible for the average person. This means that by operating from authority, programmers and security "experts" could (and have!) certify voting machines and equipment and the general population would have no easy, trustable method to know if they're being hoodwinked.
Sorry, voting machines are a bad, bad, bad idea. As somebody who programs/maintains large databases of sensitive data, I can't say with confidence that I'd even be able to trust an open or OSS solution because of the difficulty in ensuring that the software that's been reviewed is the same as the software that's actually running.
For example, what if your compiler was compromised with a virus, so that the compiler itself produced software that was virus laden?
Sorry, e-voting is too complex. The people responsible for their security are parties of interest, and so by definition can never be trusted. E-voting is a bad, bad, bad idea.
Beverly Harris (at Black Box Voting) is a quintessential example of a modern American Hero. History should remember her with the warmth and love given to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine! I can't say enough how much I respect this average US mom who simply demanded that votes be counted accurately. In so doing, she's changed the world for the better. She's received several hundred dollars from me, and I donate more every year. You would do well to throw $5 her way, and maybe download and use her press pack... it's YOUR freedom at stake!
Re:Venezuela (Score:1, Informative)
im from venezuela,
as you said, the e-voting machines here leave a paper trail, and observers and citizens from every side (left, right, center, up, down, and Hungarians) can ( and do) audit the votes once the voting table are closed.
and, in 2004 only a bunch of voting centers have e-voting machines, that number has been increased in time, the last two elections have 100% voting centers with e-voting machines.
i personally know the group of people that made the audit system for the smarmatic e-voting machines, it is made in linux, live-usb distro (debian based) and experts from several universities (some of them are against the actual government) and all of them, accept and approve the questioned machines, i still remember that in that year, they have problem with the printer driver, this drivers was only made for windows, and the maker never publish the printer specs, so they ask gently to the maker, or return every printer in every machine, after that, they made the driver and everything work perfect (the audit system).
Voting machines and audit trails (Score:3, Informative)
The paper ballot has never been the problem. Whether you mark the ballot with ink or holes doesn't really change anything. They're easy to count and handle in massive quantities, and we have a long experience dealing with them.
The problem is and has always been how to, with complete unambiguity, record the voter's intent on that paper. And here is where electronic voting machines can be of some assistance. Touch screens are a great interface for voting. It's simple for the user, can be easily localized for any potential language a voter might want to use, and it is trivial to eliminate potential overvotes and warn about undervotes.
Diebold can still get a big contract to make expensive touchscreen voting machines, so far as I care. All they have to do is sell a printer with each machine that simply prints out onto an official ballot form the voter's intent, in human readable form.
If a recount is required, OCRing (remember, we're not talking about OCRing free-form text. The OCR here will simply need to pick between a fixed set of choices) those ballots will be trivial and unambiguous. The voter himself can look at the printed ballot and verify that its contents are exactly what he wanted before turning it in.
Re:A secret ballot cannot be done from your PC (Score:3, Informative)
It is in Oregon. Close to 100% of voting in Oregon elections, including Federal elections, is done through the mail.
We've been doing it for a couple of decades now, with no major problems that I've heard of.
Re:That was I was thinking. (Score:3, Informative)
The critical part is the US Government committed a coup to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in April 2002, installing a dictator.
You cannot trust the information of the organization who tried removing the Democratically elected leader of a country outright.
An interesting bit of trivia: Hugo Chavez himself led a military coup attempt back in 1992 [wikipedia.org] against Venezuela's democratically-elected government, killing 14 people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Venezuelan_coup_d'&%23169;tat_attempts [wikipedia.org]
After an extended period of popular dissatisfaction and economic decline under the neoliberal administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez,[1] ChÃvez made extensive preparations for a military-civilian coup d'état.[3] Initially planned for December, ChÃvez delayed the MBR-200 coup until the early twilight hours of February 4, 1992. On that date, five army units under ChÃvez's command barreled into urban Caracas with the mission of assaulting and overwhelming key military and communications installations throughout the city, including the Miraflores presidential palace, the defense ministry, La Carlota military airport, and the Military Museum. ChÃvez's ultimate goal was to intercept and take custody of Pérez before he returned to Miraflores from an overseas trip.
Chavez isn't exactly a trustworthy source himself when it comes to standing up for democracy.
It's also worth noting that there's no evidence whatsoever (besides Chavez's fear-mongering and attention-whoring) that the US orchestrated the 2002 coup attempt [wikipedia.org]. Of course, that doesn't prevent the conspiracy theorists at Daily Kos, etc. from accepting Chavez's fear-mongering as irrefutable truth.