Monday, September 18, 2006

Counting the votes

Researchers at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy have conducted a study testing the security of a Diebold electronic voting machine that is in widespread use:

The Diebold AccuVote-TS [we tested] and its newer relative the AccuVote-TSx are together the most widely deployed electronic voting platform in the United States. In the November 2006 general election, these machines are scheduled to be used in 357 counties representing nearly 10% of registered voters. Approximately half these counties — including all of Maryland and Georgia — will employ the AccuVote-TS model.

The researchers found that "the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces." Perhaps the most unsettling part, if you are cynical enough: "Malicious software running on a single voting machine [and installable in about a minute] can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss."

One would have hoped that in the six years since the 2000 election debacle, we would have developed more reliable and accurate voting systems. Diebold is a favorite whipping boy on the left, due to ties between the company and the GOP, but this is not a partisan issue. Any vote-counting system has its flaws -- the ancient metal boxes used in New York City are plenty confusing and don't inspire total confidence -- but devoting resources to see that our votes are secure and verifiable (a paper trail is a good place to start, says the study) shouldn't be so hard.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:34 PM

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