Speakers dissect e-voting concerns

By Albert Chiou of the Stanford Daily

“The votes of we, the people, are now the secrets of corporations,” said Faye Anderson, a Stanford Law School graduate and the writer and producer of “Counting on Democracy,” a nationally televised documentary about the 2000 Florida presidential election. Anderson was one of five speakers who examined the problems of electronic voting machines in a panel discussion hosted last night by the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

After the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election recount, the federal government set aside millions for states to upgrade their voting equipment. Many of these states, including California, are now turning to electronic voting. According to the panelists, new e-voting machines are not the solution to the problem.

“We are completely dependent upon the reliability of these machines,” said Computer Science Prof. David Dill. According to Dill, a voter using the machine will have no idea what happened to his or her vote. He compared the e-voting machines to having a person standing in the booth to record people’s votes. In the end, voters could never be sure whether they cast their votes for the right candidate or even cast their votes at all.

Unfortunately, there is no way to check the accuracy of e-voting machines. Due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, companies that manufacture the machines do not have to share their code with the public.

The secrecy behind the source code was a concern for many of the panelists since one of the main liabilities of e-voting is its susceptibility to hacking.

“It’s very easy to hide malicious code in a large program,” said Barbara Simon, a technology policy consultant. She stated that the hackers might very well come from within the company manufacturing the machines.

“The biggest breaches of security in the last decades have been from insiders,” she said. “You can buy someone off.”

Because the manufacturers have tight deadlines for finishing the machines so that they are ready for the next election, they don’t have much time to check the code for problems. Also, due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, outside experts cannot inspect the code

For these reasons, Dill stressed the need for accountability. The current e-voting machines, which usually have a touch-screen interface, record votes in a format that Dill said can be tampered with before they are counted. After the votes are added to the ballot machine, there would be no way of going back to check whether each vote was cast correctly.

To solve this problem, he proposed that the touch-screen voting machines be directly attached to a ballot machine. The voter could then be given the choice of whether to accept or reject the ballot, and then receive a receipt. This would also open up the opportunity for a hand recount should candidates desire one.

Two of the panelists — Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Cindy Cohn and Stanford law student Nina Holly — are involved in a lawsuit concerning the problems associated with e-voting. Recent e-mail leaks from Diebold Election Systems, an e-voting machine manufacturer, suggest that the source codes used for the machines possess vulnerabilities that are not currently being fixed.

Cohn shared some of the leaked emails with the audience. In one, a Diebold technician complained to a co-worker that he did not want to run a systems test on the code. His colleague responded by telling him to run a memory test on the program instead, and then just re-label it, telling him that it would “make them happy.”

When these e-mail archives were posted on the Internet by two Swarthmore students, Diebold hit them with a cease-and-desist order, claiming that they were violating the Digital Millennium Copyright. The two students, along with Internet provider OPG, took Diebold to court. Though the company later withdrew its cease-and-desist order, Cohn and Holly are still involved after filing a motion for the judge to rule on the case.

Despite the questions about the machines, one in four California voters will be using a Diebold voting machine in the upcoming presidential primary