Class voting hacks prompt call for better audits

Bryn Nelson Columnist

The election was rigged.

One team of hackers devised an invisible touch-screen button that allowed voters in the know to easily rack up the tally for their favored candidate. Others disguised a bit of rewritten code that ensured one contender would receive 90 percent of the vote. And that was just for starters.

Thankfully, these “elections” were held within the confines of a computer science classroom at Rice University in Houston. But the exercise in electronic voting chicanery has led its chief provocateur to renew his calls for more rigorous and transparent audits of the kinds of touch-screen voting machines that are expected to tally about one-third of all ballots cast in next month’s presidential election.

Dan Wallach, an associate professor of computer science and director of Rice’s Computer Security Lab, said his class’s exercise reconfirmed his belief that anyone with a little know-how and the right access could easily do considerable damage. Anyone who trusts a system built entirely out of software with no independent checks, he said, is “building on a shaky foundation.”

Despite the classroom setting, students said the vote tampering was eye-opening not only because of how straightforward it was to cause damage, but also because of how easy it was to get away with it — despite the scrutiny of other classmates primed to look for mischief.

“Before this project, I really didn’t know anything about secure voting machines, and I sort of assumed that they would be just that — secure,” said Devin Grady, a graduate student in the computer science department. After reading about security audits of real systems and devising several ways to evade them, Grady said his confidence in electronic voting machines “has gone through the floor.”

Several company and industry representatives staunchly defended touch-screen technology, questioning the relevance of the exercise for real-world voting scenarios that include safeguards beyond the machines themselves.

“It is important to note that there have never been any documented instances of fraud or ‘hacking’ having been carried out on Sequoia’s — or any other election technology provider’s —equipment in a live election in the United States,” said Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman for the San Leandro, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems. “While well-intentioned, this type of exercise may only drive fear for the voting public.” 

Publicized failures
Studies highlighting the ease of election shenanigans, however, have been well-documented. A 2006 study by researchers at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, for example, suggested that a touch-screen voting machine widely used in elections that year was “vulnerable to extremely serious attacks.”

The researchers noted that “an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates.”

After the 2006 elections, according to several industry experts, electronic voting machines faced a public backlash over both academic concerns and actual glitches (including a well-publicized failure that resulted in more than 18,000 blank ballots in a Florida congressional race in Sarasota County decided by less than 400 votes). High-profile failures of audited systems since then in states like California, where computer scientists successfully hacked into three different electronic machines last year, have only contributed to the doubts.

“Every county that has made a change in voting equipment in the last two years has gone to optical scan equipment,” said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, Inc., a Manassas, Va.-based firm which compiles industrywide statistics.

Newly released figures from his company, in fact, suggest that roughly one-third of registered voters in the U.S. will have access to electronic voting machines for next month’s election. About 56 percent are expected to use optical scans, considered by many experts to be a more secure voting method. Nevertheless, Brace pointed out that optical scans have their own downsides, including headaches over getting voters to follow directions intended to ensure their ballots are correctly tabulated.

“There is no perfect voting system,” he said. “Each has its pluses and minuses. The key for an election official is understanding those pluses and minuses and making sure they don’t come around to bite you, you know where.”

Election officials in Florida’s Palm Beach County can attest to that. The county switched from the infamous “butterfly ballots” of 2000 to touch-screen systems, and ultimately to optical scan machines manufactured by Sequoia. A razor-thin Aug. 26 judicial primary in the county was plagued by erratic optical scan recounts of ballots sporadically recognized or ignored by the machines. (Sequoia’s Shafer blamed “election management and ballot accounting issues that had nothing whatsoever to do with their voting equipment.”)

A problem-free election process may be too much to ask for, though Rice’s Wallach hopes that putting vulnerable voting technology in the hands of budding computer scientists will lead them to advocate for better safeguards.

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