Forget Hanging Chads
09.11.04 12:41 pm | by Whitney Hess The Carnegie Pulse

In 1996, Professor Michael Shamos offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could undetectably hack an electronic voting machine. Eight years later, no one has stepped up to the plate.

Perhaps that's because the hacker has to put his money where his mouth is – in order to participate in the challenge, one would need to put up $5,000 into escrow with Shamos's ten. Whoever wins takes the pot.

The rules are simple: Shamos chooses a specific direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machine and lends it to the challenger for one month, during which he or she can tamper with it however they please. At the end of the month, Shamos has 24 hours to inspect it. After 24 hours he must decide whether or not the machine will count votes correctly, and if he determines that it will not, he must demonstrate one modification that has been made to it. If Shamos is wrong, a big bag of loot and a lifetime of bragging rights go to the sneaker. If he's right, he proves his point – electronic voting machines protect the secrecy, security, and accurate counting of ballots.

Shamos is so strong in his convictions that he has gone all the way to the courts, as an expert witness for the defense in the case Schade v. Maryland State Board of Elections. The plaintiffs argued against the use of the Diebold AccuVote TS Electronic Voting System in the state of Maryland in the upcoming 2004 elections, deeming the machines insecure and unreliable. The Diebold machines were introduced in four Maryland counties in the 2002 elections and were employed in every precinct in the state (with the exception of Baltimore City) in the 2004 Primary.

From his August 27 testimony, the court found Dr. Shamos, a distinguished career professor in the School of Computer Science and the co-director of the Institute for eCommerce, to be "the true voice of reason and the most credible expert witness in this matter," as stated by Judge Joseph P. Manck in his Memorandum Opinion, dated September 1, 2004. According to Shamos, "This is the farthest anyone has gotten in a court proceeding in the US toward getting touchscreen machines banned, and it did not succeed."

Shamos will begin teaching his new course, 17-400/803 Electronic Voting, on September 15. The course overview states that it will "review all the principal methods of electronic voting with an emphasis on reliability, security, auditability and human factors." Lectures will cover a history of voting systems, the components of DRE machines, reports of vulnerabilities of the Diebold machine, cryptographic methods, Internet voting, and the results of the 2004 Presidential Election. It is likely that, throughout his course, Shamos will substantiate his belief that electronic voting is not only secure, but that, if not tampered with, the Diebold-type machines are the most precise system of ballot counting.

On July 30, a story by the Associated Press quoted Rebecca Mercuri, a Harvard University-affiliated research fellow and one of the loudest critics of paperless voting, as saying that no one would ever rise to Shamos's challenge because it is a felony to hack into a voting machine even when it isn't being used in an election. In a response on his challenge webpage (http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/DREChallenge.htm), Shamos noted that the contestant would be "operating under a letter of permission from the vendor of the machine granting you the right to disassemble, reverse engineer, or defeat copyright protection mechanisms (if any), etc. You will not be given plans, diagrams, schematics, flowcharts, or code."

Are the techies out there in agreement with Shamos, or do they just not have the $5,000 to spare?