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HOW EASY-TO-HACK VOTING MACHINES
ENDANGER DEMOCRACY
Seven Minutes Per Machine
to Steal an Election
Since the “Help America Vote Act”
in 2002, tallying votes in
our elections has become
dependent on machines that sometimes leave no paper trail. Manufacturers
have “proprietary” programs and will not let any public officials or
independent experts examine them.
On a cold winter day in 2007,
Andrew Appel, a Princeton computer professor and election specialist, changed
the outcome on one of these machines in seven minutes. He proved something that
should alarm everyone: in effect, it took seven minutes per machine to steal an
election.
In testimony to a House of
Representatives Technology Committee on September 28, 2016, which is now
suddenly paying attention because of the fear of “Russian” hacking,
Appel noted:
“Installing new software in a
voting machine is not really much different from installing new software in any
other kind of computer. Installing new software is how you hack a voting
machine to cheat. In 2009, in the courtroom of the Superior
Machines were initially adopted
for vote counting over a
century ago, because they
promised speed and convenience. They can tally results more quickly than a more
reliable and re-checkable hand count.
From the beginning, there were
ways to corrupt non-computerized machines, Appel said. One such ploy was the
“pencil shaving trick.” Putting shavings on the lever of an opposition party
would choke off counting ballots until the shavings came loose and fell free.
While this left a tell-tale
discrepancy between the counted results and the number of voters who signed in
at that polling place to vote, the scam worked if no one checked.
Latest Computers Easier to
Hack
.
You might think the advent of
computerized voting machines, starting around 2002, would have made it harder
to corrupt
vote counting. In fact, even the
latest generation of such machines are much easier to hack without leaving a
trace.
These machines are big
money-makers for private
corporations, which lobbied
legislators about their
supposed advantages. But they also
pose a serious threat
to the integrity of our
elections.
DRE Direct-Recording Electronic
or “touchscreen” voting machines that leave no paper trail will be mainly used
by voters in 14 states, according to the Brennan Center. Those states include
Georgia, and Pennsylvania — which are in play this year. Even large
regions of Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and many other states still use them.
Among the brand names are Shouptronic,
AVC Advantage,
AccuVote OS,
Optech-III Eagle.
Most of these machines are over
10 years old, and the local authorities have no manuals for maintenance
and repair.
Claiming a lack of funds, state
legislatures have refused to replace them.
In 14 states, either computer
error or Appel-like reprogramming could distort results. Without a paper
trail, the only way to check the tally is through “initial” exit polling conducted
throughout the full span of voting hours and ending when the polls close.
Voting machines: Danaher
Shouptronic 1242, Sequoia (Dominion) AVC Advantage, Premier/Diebold (Dominion)
AccuVote OS and Optech IIIP-Eagle. Photo credit: Verified Voting
Touchscreen machines were widely
used in Ohio in the 2004 Kerry-Bush election, the only one of 154 American
contests that year in which initial exit polling, which is ordinarily reliable,
was markedly out of sync with the officially announced total. Those who know
about computers have long been skeptical of this result.
As Appel has demonstrated, tt
takes no super-hacking skills to alter voting counts: “I did this in a secure
facility and I’m confident my program has not leaked out to affect real
elections, but really the software I built was not rocket science — any
computer programmer could write the same code. Once it’s installed, it could
steal elections without detection for years to come.”
But if computer experts can hack
every variety of touchscreen machine, what about foreign governments or
domestic organizations?
“Other computer scientists have
demonstrated similar hacks on many models of machine,” Appel added. “This is
not just one glitch in one manufacturer’s machine, it’s the very nature of
computers.”
In late July and early August,
columns by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe, and Zeynep Tufekci of The
New York Times questioned for the first time whether voting in American
elections is secure from such hacking — with suspicion directed, though without
evidence, primarily at Russia. Suddenly, the disorganization and lack of
transparency of American vote counting had become a National Security Issue.
Weighing in on the issue,
President Barack Obama pointed out that most American elections are local or
state, done under diverse procedures and laws, and involving a large number of
voters. Even if particular computers, or a system of computers connected to the
Internet, could be hacked from the outside, it would be hard for a foreign or
domestic outlaw to falsify the results of a national election.
On the surface, this is a
heartening thought. But consider a close election like 2004. A targeted
hack — say, altering one candidate’s vote by an algorithm that kicks in as
precincts increase in size — might alter the outcome in certain key counties in
a swing state
In addition, voter registration
lists are centralized and kept on the Internet. During the Arizona and New York
primaries, many Democrats, often younger ones, reported that their registration
was changed without their knowledge. They were listed as a Republican or
Independent or with no year of registration indicated; as a result, they
couldn’t vote in their party’s primary.
This turned out to have been done
by election officials “by accident,” and perhaps also by hackers via Internet
access.
Bones to Pick with Bipartisan
Watchdogs
.
Now elections are watched over by
bipartisan committees in which Appel has some confidence. At least, he points
out, such supervision does not depend on a single powerful party or leader:
“When we elect our government
officials, sometimes we are voting for or against the very person or political
party who is in office right now, running that very election! How can we trust
that this person is running the election fairly? The answer is, we organize our
elections so we don’t have to trust any single person or party.
“That’s why, when you go to the
polls in most places, there are typically two poll-workers there, often (by
law) from different political parties; and there are poll-watchers,
representing the parties to make sure everything is done right. That’s why
recounts are done in the presence of witnesses from both parties. We run our
elections transparently so the parties can watch each other, and the result is
that even the losing candidate can trust that the election was run fairly. “
But there are two problems here.
So-called bipartisanship means that third parties, such as the Green Party and
the Libertarian Party, are by definition excluded.
In addition, many aspects of the
process end up in the hands of a single individual. Chief Clerk of Elections
Diane Haslett-Rudiano arbitrarily stripped 123,000 people from the Brooklyn
voter rolls in this year’s New York Democratic primary. She was later
fired by the Board of Elections — after
the.election was over.
Systemic Weak Points
.
But Appel is even more worried
about a systemic weak point in the electoral process.
“Voting machines are often
delivered to polling places several days before the election — to elementary
schools, churches, firehouses. In these locations anyone could gain access to a
voting machine for 10 minutes. Between elections the machines are routinely
opened up for maintenance by county employees or private contractors. Let’s
assume they have the utmost integrity, but still, in the US we try to run our
elections so that we can trust the election results without relying on any one
individual.”
The Necessity of Recountable
Paper Ballots
.
The only sure way to run a fair
election, Appel says, is to use and keep paper ballots. In 2009, Germany
adopted a system in which an initial exit poll is announced immediately after
voting closes — this determines a range of plausible results within a margin of
error — and then paper ballots are counted by hand. They have, since that time,
had no major controversies about electoral fairness.
Appel testified that newer,
optical screen voting machines can be equally secure if paper ballots are kept
and checked. Premier Optical Scan with Automark is used, in parts of
California, Colorado, and since 2008, under Secretary of State Jennifer
Brunner, in parts of Ohio. Often, these involve entering your vote, and leaving
a record, which you see in the machine, on a paper tape, of how your ballot was
cast.
But there are two striking
problems with even these somewhat better machines. First, in 2014, the
Environmental Protection Agency discovered that Volkswagens had an internal
computer program which had long passed US emission tests, but polluted forty
times more on the road. The cars were able to recognize when they were
being tested (and had to keep the emission controls switched on) and when they
were on the road and could pollute at will without fear of being caught. As
Barbara Simons of Verified Voting aptly put it, we do not want “VW-style
elections.”
Appel’s mantra is: “any computer
can be hacked.”
Separating paper ballots
physically from a computerized tape and keeping them in a different location,
many computer experts believe, would provide further insurance against hacking
even on optical scan machines.
Second, challenging the results,
particularly in a presidential election and even starting from an automatic
recount, as Al Gore did in Florida in 2000, is very difficult. It would take a
long time to recount the votes, even if the party in power were not trying to
sabotage it…
So the most important thing, as
in Germany, is to get each election right in the first place. Why, we might
ask, have officials sold public elections and the equal right to vote — again,
the most important public feature of our democracy — to private, profit-making
corporations? Once again, these corporations, claiming their programs are
“proprietary” secrets, do not allow any independent check of how they operate.
A few states like New Mexico have
adopted, Appel says, a model procedure for close or controversial elections:
*Immediately conduct a random
recount of part of the paper ballots.
*If there is an error, do a full
recount.
*Do not certify an election until
both are done.”
Appel and nine other experts,
including Lawrence Norden from the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center at
the New York University Law School and John McCarthy of the Verified Voting
Foundation, offered 10 suggestions for securing existing machines and
registration lists. For instance, they underline that “without voter-verified
paper ballots, effective audits are impossible; they recommend checking samples
from the voting system with hand counts of matched sets of paper ballots,
recruiting technical experts to help with such tests, and publicizing the
results, before certification of the election.
They also recommend a new,
detailed ballot accounting by each polling center and reconciliation with the
number of those who signed in to vote there. Still, to put these procedures
into practice would probably require sustained pressure from the voting public.
Moreover, anyone familiar with
vote counting in precincts across the country knows that many computer checking
and security measures these experts recommend are far too sophisticated for
most poll-watchers to implement before the November 8 election. Further, all
Secretaries of State, who are often unabashed political partisans, would have
to have good intentions — an assumption hard to reconcile with the actions of Kenneth
Blackwell in Ohio in 2004 or Katherine Harris
in Florida in 2000.
In contrast, consider the record
of Dana Debeauvoir, election clerk in Travis County which includes the
University of Texas (Austin). She has worked with critics and computer
experts, to propose a new type of encryption plus a paper record (it will not
be ready, unfortunately, until the 2020 election).
A federal law requiring oversight
of elections by politically independent or neutral state officials would vastly
improve the security of the American electoral process. But Appel is not
optimistic about the prospect of Congressionally mandated reforms. For
the upcoming election, some of the recommended measures will be in place in
some jurisdictions across the country.
After this election, however,
with a strong democratic push from below, it might be possible to outlaw the
highly insecure DREs (touch-screen machines), provide adequate funding
as well as training for election officials nationwide, and ensure an
independent paper trail on optical scan machines.
In fact, it might even be
possible to go to a paper ballot backed up by an initial exit poll. In contrast
to this November 8 — when, at best, only the large scale of the election makes
likely a trustworthy result — such reforms would ensure that our elections are,
both in appearance and in reality, fair.
The Dakota and Lakota tribes have long lived in this territory. Here, led by Sitting Bull and Red Cloud, they fought off the U.S. Army and were defeated after long battles. Here, on Sept. 3, 1863, the army committed the Whitestone Massacre of 300 men, women, and children. The tribes still hold treaty rights to this land. Their ancestors are buried here.
But the Lakota were not consulted by the Army Corps of Engineers, either about their gravesites nor the waters, in the most recent plan to build an oil pipeline.
We spent five days with the land protectors (they do not call themselves protesters, but protectors or defenders). We listened to drumming and prayer songs, sometimes late into the night. We met three Cheyenne and Arapaho women who had just driven 15 hours from Oklahoma, and a man from Minnesota who had been at Standing Rock for a week, gone away, and had just returned.
We heard a Minnesota woman who lived near Lake Superior speak about how when she was growing up, you could catch and eat a fish every day. One day, her grandfather warned that there would be a fight over the purity of the water. This had seemed unimaginable to her, the water blue or gray, shifting with sun or clouds.
