There's No Place Like Home: Plan L for NY Elections

-- Dan Wallach, Rice University computer security expert has examined electronic voting systems since 2001, and has testified about voting security issues before government bodies in the U.S., Mexico, and the European Union. Quote from Peering through the chinks in the armor of high-tech elections, May 27, 2007   

5. Florida's Department of State commissioned a report in 2007 which found, "Flaws in the Optical Scan software enable an unofficial memory card to be inserted into an active terminal. Such a card can be preprogrammed to swap the electronically tabulated votes for two candidates, reroute all of a candidate's votes to a different candidate, or tabulate votes for several candidates of choice toward a different candidate.  

-- Gardner, Ryan, Alec Yasinsac, Matt Bishop, Tadayoshi Kohno, Zachary Hartley, John Kerski, David Gainey, Ryan Waalega, Evan Hollander, and Michael Gerke. Software Review and Security Analysis of the Diebold Voting Machine Software. Florida Dept. of State: Florida State University, Security and Assurance in Information Technology Laboratory, July 27, 2007.  

6.  "There would be no way to know that any of these attacks occurred; the canvass procedure would not detect any anomalies, and would just produce incorrect results. The only way to detect and correct the problem would be by recount of the original paper ballots."  

-- California Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board (VSTAAB), Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuBasic Interpreter, February 14, 2006 

7. In 2003, a report for Congress found:  "[T]he growing use of information technology in elections ... provides the opportunity for new kinds of attacks, from new kinds of attackers." 

And, later, "New and more ingenious kinds of malware are constantly being invented and used. There are now tens of thousands of known viruses, and the sophistication of tools used to develop and use new ones has increased.  

"Malware in a voting system could be designed to operate in very subtle ways, for example, dropping or changing votes in a seemingly random way to make detection more difficult. Malware can also be designed to be adaptive - changing what it does depending on the direction of the tally. It could also potentially be inserted at any of a number of different stages in the development and implementation process - from the precinct all the way back to initial manufacture - and lie in wait for the appropriate moment."  

(and see recent article published by Dr. Pfafffenberger entitled, Making Every Ballot Count)  

I've received a Scholar's Award from the National Science Foundation to study the history of lever voting machines, a subject that has never been studied by a scholar with professional training in the history of technology (or in any other discipline, for that matter). I am currently writing a book tentatively titled Machining the Vote, which covers the history of lever machines from their invention in 1888 to the bankruptcy of the leading manufacturer, Automatic Voting Corporation, in 1983. Highlights of my findings: 

1. In my analysis, the lever machine deserves recognition as one of the most astonishing achievements of American technological genius, a fact that is reflected in their continued competitiveness against recent voting technologies in every accepted performance measure. With as many as 28,000 parts, their mechanisms reflect an agonizingly difficult period of development, spanning more than twenty years (1888-1919) in which interlocking mechanisms had to be developed that were capable of dealing with the enormous complexity and variety of American elections. The result was a machine that captures in its immutable mechanical operations the voting rules that the American people, in their wisdom, developed in order to capture the will of the people. 

The mind balks, perhaps, at the suggestion that a century-old technology might be the equal of today's best technologies -- or even superior! -- but the fact is that the lever machine is not alone. U.S. freight railroads continue to use electromechanical signaling systems that were, coincidentally, developed during almost exactly the same frame (1890s-1920). There is no sense of urgency to replace them. Their reliability has been proven in a century of service. They are perfectly adapted to the conditions of American railroading. They are easily understood and maintained by technicians with modest educational backgrounds. 

3. Although lever machines do not produce an independent audit trail, this is -- as software engineers say -- a feature, not a bug. In the 1880s and 1890s, paper ballots emerged as the locus par excellence of election fraud; lever machines were expressly designed to take the human element out of every aspect of the vote recording and counting process in order to eliminate fraud that was gravely undermining Americans' confidence in their democracy. It is quite astonishing to realize that, while the lever machine was under development, inventors came up with just about every voting machine concept that has since been realized, including precinct-scan punchcard technologies, ballot printing machines, and even electromechanical systems that can be seen as predecessors of computerized technologies. All of these technologies produced paper records, however, and all were flatly rejected, both by voters and election officials, as letting the possibility of fraud in through the back door.  Today, there are widespread calls to bring paper back into the picture, but the reason is that people do not trust the machines. 

Having studied the history, I strongly believe that there would be no such call for paper if the ugly history of fraudulent practices enabled by paper ballots were known -- unfortunately, the American people have forgotten the lessons they learned a century ago, and I greatly fear that we will have to repeat them in order to learn them again. The truth of the matter is that our American election system, in contrast, to the election administration systems of most advanced democracies, is inordinately decentralized, less than professionally administered in many instances, and politicized. In New York, the people, in their wisdom, created a system of election administration AND a technology that solved the characteristic problems of American elections; to abandon lever machines for new technologies that will not gain voter confidence and, at the same time, re-introduce paper audit trails or paper ballots which have long proven to be prone to election fraud, amounts in my opinion to a potentially disastrous mistake.  

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