Hacking the Vote

Hacking The Vote: One in 20 people using a DRE machine will have his or her vote counted incorrectly.

"Reliability, more than fraud, bugs voting machines

AS AMERICA’S presidential election process stumbles its way towards November, fears are surfacing of yet another Florida- or Ohio-style voting fiasco. In the New Hampshire primary on January 8th, both independent polls before the election and exit polls on the day itself predicted that Barack Obama would soundly defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Mrs Clinton’s surprising upset cast fresh doubts over the reliability of the computerised machines used to count the vote.

Four out of five votes in New Hampshire were tallied by Accuvote machines from Premier Election Solutions, part of the Diebold Corporation. The remainder were counted by hand. Accuvote machines rely on an optical scanner to read paper ballots completed by voters, who use pens or pencils to fill in little ovals next to the candidate of their choice. The machines read the blackened ovals and tally the result.

When the results were in, Mr Obama had a four-percentage-point lead on the hand-counted part of the ballot. But Mrs Clinton’s three-percentage-point margin on the much bigger machine-counted part made her the overall winner. A manual recount was subsequently abandoned for lack of money.

The problem with direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems like Diebold’s Accuvote and others from Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Hart InterCivic is their vulnerability to sloppy installation, poor maintenance, shoddy software, infrequent updates and accidental loss of data.

In 2003, an author doing research for a book stumbled across a website on which a copy of Diebold’s source code for its voting machines along with manuals and memos from technicians were posted for all to see. Word about the machines’ appalling security quickly spread through the blogosphere.

A team of computer scientists—three from Johns Hopkins University and one from Rice University—subsequently published a scholarly critique of the Diebold software. They found hundreds of flaws in the source code, ranging from lack of password protection on the main database to bugs that allowed people with a certain type of smart-card to vote as many times as they liked. The software provided no way to verify that a vote had been correctly recorded, and no permanent record was kept. The company claimed that particular software was out of date, and had never actually been used in an election.

But the biggest indictment of DRE machines yet has come from Ohio. Recall that Ohio was where election officials purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls and illegally derailed a recount during the 2004 election that many believe would have given John Kerry the presidency. The 334-page follow-up report, published last month, paints a disturbing picture.

The independent researchers found numerous design and maintenance flaws. One machine from ES&S known as the M100 even accepted counterfeit ballots. Premier’s AV-TSX allowed unauthenticated users to tamper with its memory. The Hart EMS had audit logs that could be easily erased.

On all machines, the root cause of the poor security was the way standard practices for key and password management, security hardware and cryptography had been blindly ignored. Auditing was virtually non-existent. Logs of events happening during an election could be easily forged or erased by those operating the system. In all cases, the software was deemed “fragile” at best.

Yet these are the machines that 100m Americans will use to record their vote in the months ahead. The $3.9 billion of federal money allocated to state election boards in 2002 following the Florida fiasco has led to some 40,000 DRE machines being installed across the country. Far from making elections more representative and transparent, the machines seem to have made matters worse.

This does not mean electronic voting should be abandoned. After all, ordinary ballot boxes can be stuffed or stolen. Indeed, the vote-counting mess in Florida during the 2000 presidential election—the cause of America’s wholesale adoption of electronic voting—was triggered by inadequacies in paper-based balloting.

Bruce Schneier, a blogger on security technology, argues that the failure of electronic voting stems from the way technology invariably increases the number of steps in any process—with each step bringing yet more scope for errors.

Optical scanners, for instance, have twice as many steps as manual counting, making them at least twice as unreliable. First, the voter reads the ballot paper and fills in the ovals, the optical reader senses the blackened ovals, the scanner passes the vote to a tabulator, the tabulator collects all votes from that machine and then transmits the score to a central totaliser. Each step can have an error of a percentage point or two, giving the system as a whole something like a 5% error. That means one in 20 people using a DRE machine will have his or her vote counted incorrectly.

Mr Schneier has two suggestions. First, all DRE machines should have a paper audit trail—so the voter can verify the choice of candidate selected and confirm that the vote was, indeed, recorded. The paper audit also acts as a backup copy in case the machine fails and a recount is required. For added security, the voter wouldn’t be allowed to take a copy of the audit home. If they did, unscrupulous individuals might be encouraged to sell their vote.

The second recommendation is that the software used on DRE machines should be open to public scrutiny. Interested parties could then review the software, identify bugs and correct them. That alone would do much to increase public confidence in the process.… (read the rest at the Economist)

http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10573225

And what if the Karl Rove virus does cross the GOP/DEM barrier? (Lessig Blog)

And what if the Karl Rove virus does cross the GOP/DEM barrier? (Lessig Blog):

So Obama said the obvious (that Reagan's administration was transformational). And he also said that the GOP pushed a set of ideas in the 1980s that quickly captured many Dems (including, let's not forget, Clinton (see, e.g., welfare reform)). That too was obvious. But just as it's obvious to anyone with integrity that when Time names Putin as "Person of the Year" (or Hitler for that matter), Time is not endorsing the positions of Putin or Hitler, so too is it obvious (to anyone with integrity) that Obama was not endorsing Reaganomics. (Krugman, in my view, has that integrity. But he's just gone off the deep end here. There's no myth about the success of "voodoo economics" (as Bush the First put it) to be debunked). Indeed, as Obama pointed out in the most flashy line of the debate, he was on the streets of Chicago organizing against Reaganomics. His statement about "ideas" was simply identifying the kind of leadership he wanted his presidency to aspire to. That's precisely the leadership I want a president to aspire to too.

Yet HRC repeated the slander that Obama was endorsing or recommending those policies. I understand the political gain from creating that impression in people. But someone who does that in that way betrays a basic lack of integrity.

"Let's start with the disappointment: Debates are not Obama's forte. If he were running for Prime Minister, I'd have second thoughts. I can't understand why he isn't better prepared for the obvious exchange that was going to happen. It took way too long to get to (w/r/t the Reagan absurdity): 'I obviously don't agree with his ideas and never said I did, and indeed, I worked against them.' It took way too long to get to (w/r/t the 'present vote' issue): 'In the US Senate, voting present would be bad Senatoring. In the Illinois Senate, it is how the system works. My 180 votes out of 4000 is just the same as ....' And w/r/t health care, he never got to 'my plan IS universal because it is made available, in an affordable way, to everyone. I just don't believe in fining poor people. I believe in helping them.' Again and again, the echo of Obama's message was 'it's legitimate for us to disagree about ...' What good is that line doing -- especially given the completely illegitimate charges raised against him by HRC? Someone has go sit him down and force him to spit back 10 second responses to these questions. It isn't rocket science. It is practice and training.

But disappointment is one thing; (this word sounds too harsh, I know, but) disgust is something else. For there was a basic lack of integrity in the Clinton show last night. As a former friend of Clinton put it to me last night, 'I now understand just why people hated the Clintons so.'

For example: The absurdity about the Reagan comments (and slowly the press is coming around to the recognizing the absurdity in the comments, at least if you believe the Obama survey of the sources).

So too with the extraordinarily cheap shot of saying Obama worked for a "slum lord."

As Hillary Clinton of the Rose Law Firm (remember Whitewater?) certainly knows, even assuming (falsely) that Obama represented this "slum landlord," that one gives a client a defense does not mean one has endorsed the ethics or values of the client. And more certainly, the fact that as an associate at a law firm, one spent 4 hours working on a memo does not signal that one has endorsed the ethics or values of the client. Pt the partner of the client. As the Washington Post Factchecker reports:

William Miceli, Obama's supervisor at the law firm, said the firm represented the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., a nonprofit group that redeveloped a run-down property on Chicago's South Side with Rezko. He called Clinton's assertion that Obama represented Rezko in a slum landlord business "categorically untrue."

"He was a very junior lawyer at the time, who was given responsibility for basic due diligence, document review," said Miceli, adding that Obama did what he was told by the firm. According to Miceli, that was the only time Obama worked on a Rezko-related project while at the law firm.

But of course the irrelevance of this to Obama or his values is not obvious to people outside of legal practice. That means it was an effective charge politically. Clinton knew the truth. It was a plainly unethical charge for her to make. (Recall Advice and Consent: "Sir, have you no shame?")"

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/and_what_if_the_karl_rove_viru.html

Editing Hillary’s Story - New York Times

Editing Hillary’s Story - New York Times:

The implicit promise of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy was that she had learned from Clinton I. In her, Americans would have a candidate who had been in the very center of White House decision-making. And the very fact that so much had gone wrong was added value. She is nothing if not a good learner, and — the story went — she had discovered at great price where all the landmines lay, both in the presidency and her own character.

"But now Bill is all over the place — campaign guru, surrogate candidate, one-man first response team. By next week, he’ll be designing the bumper stickers.

The Democratic elders are wringing their hands about the ex-president’s rants at Barack Obama, worrying that he’ll alienate black voters. That doesn’t seem all that likely. African-Americans have stuck with the Democrats through a lot worse than a fight over who said what about Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

And you can’t deny the Clintons’ double-teaming is throwing Barack off his game. “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,” he complained during Monday’s debate.

But in the process, they’re ruining the central selling point of her campaign, the story that explains why she’s the one a dispirited country should trust to make things better.

Bill’s role as Chief Attack Dog undermines all that. If he’s all over her campaign, he’s going to be all over her administration. Instead of the original promise of the thoroughly educated Hillary, we’re being offered the worst-case scenario — that the pair of them are going to return to Pennsylvania Avenue and recreate the old Clinton chaos.

Every candidacy has one. Barack’s is about the child of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya whose very lineage makes him the vehicle for a transcendent national unity. Hillary’s isn’t how the smart girl from Illinois who overcame every obstacle fate could throw at her to become the first woman president. Instead, it’s a version of the story we love best of all, about second chances and the American capacity to turn failure into redemption.

She admits she messed up during her early first lady years. The health care plan was a disaster. Travelgate is still too embarrassing to go near. “Oh, we made so many mistakes,” she said last summer, waving away the woes of 1993 and 1994 in one fell swoop, all the while referring to the first Clinton presidency in the first person plural.

Her biggest error was taking a major policy role in her husband’s administration. During the 1992 campaign many people, including me, were offended when the public seemed to want to limit Hillary to the adoring gaze and cookie-baking role. But the public was onto something. It wasn’t Hillary’s gender that was the problem, it was her status as spouse.

It’s almost never a good idea for the boss to bring a husband/wife into management. It muddies up the lines of authority, and it lets personal relationships contaminate the professional ones. As every sentient being on the planet knows, the Clintons have an extremely complicated marriage, and sticking it smack in the middle of the chain of command caused chaos."

For someone who is supposed to be running on her record, Clinton, and her campaign are expending a phenomenol amount of effort misrepresenting, muddying and morphing Obama's record into something that it is not now and never was.

The confident, inevitable, candidate has no confidence in her own record, and, apparently not much more in her husband's. The sneak attacks didn't work. Now, there seem to be no limits on what they'll say or do.

They don't believe the voters can handle the truth.…

…They've given up highlighting Hillary's qualifications, policies and aspirations. The message now is "Watch out for that unqualified black guy." The truth is affirmative action is what she's running on. The more desperate the situation, the more she'll play the victim. Dishing it out is the "fun part." Let's see if she can take good dose of truth. It'll depend on "what the meaning of is is."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/opinion/24collins.html?th&emc=th

The Truth About Ethics Reform - New York Times

The Truth About Ethics Reform - New York Times:

At a debate before the New Hampshire primary, Charles Gibson, the news anchor, and former Senator John Edwards poked fun at the fact that the ban on lobbyists’ buying meals does not prevent lobbyists from providing food and drinks to lawmakers at stand-up receptions. Mrs. Clinton cited that comment approvingly last week on “Meet the Press.” As they all surely know, there is a big difference between attending a crowded reception and pressing a cause at intimate sit-down meals.

"We’ve long grown used to candidates’ cherry-picking each other’s records to score points in a campaign. But the new Congressional ethics law, and the role Senator Barack Obama played in passing it, have been belittled in troubling ways that are worth noting.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton voted for the ethics measure, but has lately suggested that it was neither a landmark change nor particularly controversial. Wrong on both counts.

No ethics law is perfect, and much depends on the vigor with which the changes are enforced. But there was a big cultural shift in the legislation’s ban on gifts, meals and travel paid for by lobbyists, and provisions requiring greater disclosure of lawmakers’ pet projects and making it harder for former lawmakers to capitalize on their Capitol Hill connections.

Mocking the ethics law simply fuels a cynicism that can only make future ethics battles harder.

The measure ultimately passed the Senate by a lopsided 83-to-14 vote, hardly surprising because few lawmakers want to go on record against cleaning up Congress, especially in the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The hard part was assembling and passing a strong package of rules against intense resistance within Congress and from lobbyists.

With Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, Mr. Obama played a central role in this effort. Forcing fellow members of Congress to disclose the names of lobbyists who bundle campaign donations is not the sort of thing that endears you to your colleagues."

Distortion seems to be at the heart of the Clinton strategy.

Why else would they take a hundred of the four thousand votes cast in the Illinois Senate out of context to prove what is demonstrably a lie.

I wonder if Senator Clinton cast four hundred votes in her entire Senate service. Do you think it even approaches a thousand. By her own admission, she's voted for bills she never read.

She's got mud on her face, bloody a disgrace, waving her husband all over the place.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/opinion/21mon2.html?th&emc=th