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Security Software The Courts United States Politics

Georgia Defends Electronic Voting Machines Despite 243-Percent Turnout In One Precinct (arstechnica.com) 431

"In Chicago, it used to be claimed that even death couldn't stop a person from voting," writes Slashdot reader lunchlady55. "But in the Deep South, there are new reports of discrepancies in voter turnout with the approval of new electronic voting systems." Ars Technica reports: [I]f any state is a poster child for terrible election practices, it is surely Georgia. Bold claims demand bold evidence, and unfortunately there's plenty; on Monday, McClatchy reported a string of irregularities from the state's primary election in May, including one precinct with a 243-percent turnout.

McClatchy's data comes from a federal lawsuit filed against the state. In addition to the problem in Habersham County's Mud Creek precinct, where it appeared that 276 registered voters managed to cast 670 ballots, the piece describes numerous other issues with both voter registration and electronic voting machines. (In fact it was later corrected to show 3,704 registered voters in the precinct.) Multiple sworn statements from voters describe how they turned up at their polling stations only to be turned away or directed to other precincts. Even more statements allege incorrect ballots, frozen voting machines, and other issues.
"George is one of four states in the U.S. that continues to use voting machines with no ability to provide voters a paper record so that they can verify the machine counted their vote correctly," the report adds.
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Georgia Defends Electronic Voting Machines Despite 243-Percent Turnout In One Precinct

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  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @10:18PM (#57094572)
    The machine could be faulty, print out exactly who you voted for, yet still record your vote wrong. How would having a piece of paper help? You can't go back and change your vote.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The machine also doesn't store the votes. Each voter gets a single card as he walks in and has to return it to the pollsters as he walks out.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @11:46PM (#57094852)

        The machine also doesn't store the votes. Each voter gets a single card as he walks in and has to return it to the pollsters as he walks out.

        That's not correct.
        The token you hand in does not contain your vote for an obvious reason. It used only to verify that the number of votes cast is the number of votes recorded, and that the voter is a valid voter (having been given the token).

        The voting machine store the votes cast on that machine, and the votes are extracted from the voting machines locally to a memory card after the polls close. Each counties memory cards are taken to a tabulation computer (not internet connected) that reads the voting machines memory cards and tabulates the totals. The tabulation machine's totals are then put on a memory card and loaded into an internet connected server that uploads the totals to the State of Georgia's central server.
        The memory cards are encrypted with a unique key for each county so the state knows that the upload is from a valid device.
        No voting machine is ever connected to the Internet. Actually, I'm fairly sure they are never connected to any network.
        The totals are uploaded to the States web server where it is published for anyone to see, and also for each counties voting commissioner to verify that their counties votes are recorded correctly by the state. There is considerable detail in the result spread sheets.
        general results:
        http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/63991/184321/en/summary.html
        detailed results by county, type of ballot (provisional, advance, absentee, polling place):
        http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/63991/184321/en/reports.html#

        There are some obvious holes in the system.
        For each election, the local county downloads a config file from the state that contains what election, who is running, the screen layouts etc.
        Then the local county manually installs that onto each voting machine using memory cards. At some point the memory card used to update the voting machines is placed in a computer that has shared a device with a computer that is connected to the internet. So if the internet connected computer is infected, then it could infect the memory card used to update the voting machines.

        Also, if a voting machine is bricked, then the votes from that machine are irrecoverably lost.
        This happened frequently when using mechanical voting machines back in the Jim Crow days, but usually only machines in the polling places of Black neighborhoods would fail.

        Also, the other thing about electronic voting machines is that every voter has physical access. If no one is watching, a person could break into the voting machine (they do have a lock), connect a memory card and load malware. or brick it.

        • by RavenLrD20k ( 311488 ) on Thursday August 09, 2018 @07:55AM (#57095816) Journal

          Also, if a voting machine is bricked, then the votes from that machine are irrecoverably lost.

          12 years ago I did a few rounds as an election tech in GA shortly after they first started using the electronic machines. Back then the machines had the capability to each print out a record of votes counted with a built-in printer that had memory independent from the unit's main memory. This was done so there was still a way to retrieve the votes from the machine both as a fail-safe if the machine became disabled as well as an audit trail in case of discrepancies. It was a matter of procedure that the precincts had to generate the "receipt" print-out from each machine and send them into the county Board of Elections office with the memory card and stack of tokens so the officials could make sure there was at least a card for each vote according to the printed totals. While they did that, I was inserting the memory card and dialing up the Secretary of State server for the uploads.

    • Assuming you get to keep the paper, it makes it possible to audit the results to a much higher degree of certainty.
      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @10:50PM (#57094676)

        Assuming you get to keep the paper, it makes it possible to audit the results to a much higher degree of certainty.

        Not really. It is just a receipt, not a list of who/what you voted for. You can use it to confirm that your vote was counted, but not that the vote was recorded correctly, nor that additional fake ballots were not also counted.

        Opponents of electronic voting talk about "paper ballots" like they are some magical thing than ensures fair elections. That is nonsense.

        It is easy to have a verified vote.

        It is easy to have a secret vote.

        It is very, very difficult to have both.

        • by currently_awake ( 1248758 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @11:22PM (#57094780)
          Make your choices on the computer. Print out ballot. Verify choices printed. If wrong do over or complain. Once satisfied put ballot into ballot box to be counted. There is no need to have the computer count the votes or transmit them to a central location or be connected to a network.
          • I agree with your final statement, and most of the first few statements, but human vote counters are a huge vulnerability and weakness. It is better to have a computer count them, and then if there is any suspicion of fraud, require the paper ballots to be scanned and put on the internet for anyone to count.
            • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @11:58PM (#57094886) Journal

              That's how it works where I vote.

              Fill out paper ballot, it is then scanned and kept. I can't audit that my vote was accurately counted, but an audit can be done globally.

              • I can't audit that my vote was accurately counted,

                Yeah. And there's probably not any way to do that while maintaining anonymity.

                but an audit can be done globally.

                Which is an ideal Georgia is obviously still working towards.

              • by Zalbik ( 308903 )

                I support this idea, but nobody would ever go for it.

                Why? It just increases the cost of voting.

                You would need to audit every vote to ensure the counting machines weren't tampered with. If you are auditing every vote, it costs at least as much as a paper/pencil election.

                • Maryland spent $65 million on electronic voting machines in 2002, and replaced them for the 2016 election with $28 million of optical scanning machines. Ballots, oddly enough, cost millions of dollars each election (the ballots end up costing you more than the machines). Maryland estimated reprinting Baltimore County primary election ballots (1/6 of Maryland population) at $3 million when there was an error; that means Maryland spends $30 million in 12 years on machines and over $400 million on paper bal

              • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday August 09, 2018 @05:48AM (#57095546) Homepage Journal

                Voting is one of the few times that a blockchain could actually make things better.

                You vote on the computer and get a receipt with a secret transaction ID on it. You can then verify your vote against the public blockchain any time you like using that transaction ID (which is anonymous), and anyone can verify the overall count and integrity of the chain too.

                Some care will be required to make sure the votes remain anonymous. The most obvious risk is correlating people's visits to the polling station with transactions on the blockchain, but there are ways to prevent that.

          • by Zalbik ( 308903 )

            So....you want to use a very expensive pencil for electronic voting?

        • It is easy to have a verified vote.

          It is easy to have a secret vote.

          It is very, very difficult to have both.

          Not even with a blockchain?

    • print out a blockchain and use the paper receipt as proof of work.

      (I don't think any machine does that, just throwing out what is theoretically possible if a voting machine did give you some paper)

      • The "proof of work" is only meaningful in the presence of more computing power than any one person can control. If the computers providing the power of the proof of work is provided by the voting office, then the proof of work could be forged by the exact same computers in the amount of time it took to calculate the proof of work in the first place.
        • depends on the implementation details. you're making a lot of assumptions.

          • Right. The important thing is that you realize what "proof of work" means.
            • well theoretically if I have a printer I can print whatever I want. So given that a voting machine is supposed to be a trusted system that has been audited. Then my receipt needs to have a quick way to verify that it is correct. The first part is a counterfeit machine can't offer an authentic print out, so something as well known a a digital signature would be sufficient if that was the only concern. The second part is that would like to have some high confidence that the work you requested the machine to d

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The paper results can be seen by different election observers and a much more city and state wide tally can be created.
    • In my precinct, they print the voting results out on paper, the voter can look at it, verify that it is correct (or discard it and try again) then the paper result gets stored by machine. That gives you a full paper trail if you want to go back and verify.
      • In my precinct, they print the voting results out on paper, the voter can look at it, verify that it is correct (or discard it and try again) then the paper result gets stored by machine. That gives you a full paper trail if you want to go back and verify.

        Better yet you should be able to watch it drop into a transparent box under the voting machine. That way you know your paper result is being stored and that extra votes aren't being added.

        Really, this isn't a hard problem to solve. The first requirement for any electronic voting machine should be that it is difficult to compromise the results even if you let the attacker write the damn source code.

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        My precinct takes a slightly more efficient approach. Rather than using a machine to capture the vote and print it out, the voter marks their vote directly on the paper.

        This provides the voter with certainty on the candidate(s) their vote will support, is its own inherent paper trail and also removes any digital vulnerabilities from the process.

        I'm surprised your precinct hasn't considered this proven and effective option.

    • by Z80a ( 971949 )

      You kinda can.
      Assuming enough people actually kept their piece of papers, you could make a manual recount by those.

      • Assuming enough people actually kept their piece of papers, you could make a manual recount by those.

        Assuming EVERYONE actually kept their piece of paper, you mean? Otherwise, your "manual recount" is only going to be a partial recount, with no way of judging whether it had any real similarity to the original vote.

    • The machine stores the vote and produces a scantron-like receipt which the voter then turns in at the registration desk. This receipt is easy to read, meaning a voter can have confidence that they really voted as they intended.

      Then these paper receipts are scanned by a low-tech machine which tallies the votes, while the voting machine/network itself tallies it's votes, and they are compared. The votes from the machines themselves are considered "fuzzy", while the paper scantron-ballot is considered the pr

    • Of course. But at least giving out a receipt will likely detect stuck keys/levers and many other mechanical issues.

      OTOH, maybe elections are something that really should not be automated.

    • It's Peter Gutmann's principles of best practices: nobody knows wtf they're talking about, but somebody says it's best practice. Paper ballots are considered secure for reasons.

      People think silly things, like that the voter keeping his own paper ballot somehow makes the system auditable [slashdot.org], or that paper ballots recounted days or weeks later can't be tampered.

      We can get stronger guarantees of integrity out of EVMs than paper, if somebody actually works out an election security model as a starting point.

  • by Ly4 ( 2353328 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @10:25PM (#57094600)

    Obligatory:
    https://xkcd.com/2030/ [xkcd.com]

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I also think we don't want to. America is not and has never been a Democracy. And no, I don't mean "We're a Republic". Our entire political system (most notably the Senate and the Electoral college) is built to lesson the effects of Democracy and disenfranchise the 'wrong' type of voter.
      • by bidule ( 173941 )

        *lessen

        Nice typo, but it's also true that the lesson of Democracy is to disenfranchise the 'wrong' type of voter.

    • Re:Obligatory xkcd (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Thursday August 09, 2018 @12:10AM (#57094916)

      It is very much worth noting that the problem with the XKCD article is comparing Aircraft and Elevator safety with Software... why? Because of the law. If you design a bad machine and people die you can be very easily sued out of existence or go to jail. Just imagine that every plane and elevator had a sign posted saying, ride at your own risk because we are not responsible for a malfunction taking your limbs or life... a lot of folks would be taking the stairs and driving places instead.

      Write software and you just say, not responsible for my shitty work because we have no standards for expediency and cost purposes.

      Changing the law so that software is not allowed to escape a law suit with a simple tos agreement would change a whole farking load of things.

      "I don't quiet know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die."

      Making the field as culpable for its fuck up like manufacturers would change that shit real fucking fast. Shit programmers would be tossed very quickly and several of those "awesome" programmers able to cut corners super fast would fall from grace with some epic face plants into the concrete below.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      So the joke is that software engineers and computer scientists think that everyone else in their field is terrible at it?

      Voting with blockchain for verification sounds like a good idea. When we look at other blockchain systems they do get compromised sometimes, but the key thing is that the compromise is always publicly verifiable and easy to detect. The public nature of the blockchain and established cryptographic rules governing its behaviour mean that even if it is "hacked" in some way people will notice

  • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @10:46PM (#57094660)

    The problemwith election commissions in the US are that they don't care so much about accuracy as they do about the budget and keeping drama to a minimum. So when they see a report of a clearly impossible number, their first instinct is not to investigate and see how this happened and try to correct it. Their first action is to try and make the perception of the problem go away, thus reducing the chance of drama occuring (recounts, bad press, the wrong party winning, etc).

    So when the predicted problems with electronic voting machines showed up it was also predicatable that excuses would be made: we're out of budget since we just bought these election machines; at least they're better than the butterfly ballots; we'll look into it, honest; and "look, a Squirrel!!"

  • Looks like some electrons in Georgia took that saying to heart.

  • by hawguy ( 1600213 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @10:58PM (#57094704)

    Why not just count paper ballots like Canada does? Each precinct tallies up their counts and reports them upstream where they are aggregated. The manual counts are supervised by representatives from each party. Publish all of the counts and subtotals so they can be verified. Even if there are a 100 million ballots to count, by distributing the work, it can still be done in a timely manner.

    • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @11:01PM (#57094718)

      We are 100% vote by mail.

      I actually miss going to a polling place, though. It made voting and democracy seem very real, somehow.

      • We are 100% vote by mail.

        Wait what? How can you have a democratic system of government by mail vote. If you do that you don't get a democracy sausage [wikipedia.org]

        I don't understand America.

        • Wait what? How can you have a democratic system of government by mail vote. If you do that you don't get a democracy sausage [wikipedia.org]

          Back before we went 100% vote by mail, our polling places were generally well stocked with muffins and coffee. You have to realize that most of our poll volunteers were little old ladies...

          I like the democracy sausage concept! I also like the compulsory vote. Unfortunately neither one is likely to ever catch on in America.

    • by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @11:04PM (#57094726) Homepage

      The US is founded on the principle that if there's a right way to do something, they have the freedom to also do it 49 worse ways.

      • Don't knock diversity of approach. Different people trying something many different ways can be the best way of finding the right way. That's one of the best features of freedom.
        • The old saying: "Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing, after they have tried every other choice".
          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward

            During Ww2 they had a saying .
            When the Germans shoot, the British duck.
            When the British shoot, the Germans duck.
            When the Americans shoot, everybody ducks.

        • by Zalbik ( 308903 )

          It's also an awesome way of finding a bunch of really stupid ways to do something....like with electronic voting for instance.

          The freedom to try different approaches shouldn't override our rights to have fair elections.

          Unfortunately, that's exactly what every attempted form of electronic voting I've heard of does.

    • Why not just count paper ballots like Canada does?

      Do you vote on 20 or more different races and propositions at once, twice a year?

    • Why not just count paper ballots like Canada does? Each precinct tallies up their counts and reports them upstream where they are aggregated. The manual counts are supervised by representatives from each party. Publish all of the counts and subtotals so they can be verified. Even if there are a 100 million ballots to count, by distributing the work, it can still be done in a timely manner.

      Why do we not use paper you ask?

      I have two words for you on that topic.

      Hanging chads.

      • by hipp5 ( 1635263 )

        Why not just count paper ballots like Canada does? Each precinct tallies up their counts and reports them upstream where they are aggregated. The manual counts are supervised by representatives from each party. Publish all of the counts and subtotals so they can be verified. Even if there are a 100 million ballots to count, by distributing the work, it can still be done in a timely manner.

        Why do we not use paper you ask?

        I have two words for you on that topic.

        Hanging chads.

        Huh? We don't use punch vote systems so there are no chads. We get a printed paper with the candidates and literally just 'x' off a box for our preferred candidate. Then each individual polling box is counted by a poll observer, and each candidate is allowed to have an observer for each box. The observers get to see (but never touch!) each ballot, and can challenge any one that looks like it was improperly marked. These are noted, and if the final vote is close and gets appealed, the first thing they'll loo

  • Never forget (Score:5, Informative)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57094794) Journal

    Habersham County’s Mud Creek

    Mud Creek is overwhelmingly one party. It is the same party as the Secretary of State, who is now running for governor of Georgia. He's being sued for disenfranchising minority voters, elderly voters and young voters. I'm going to let you guys guess which party it is. Here's a hint: it's the party that is constantly crying about voter fraud that doesn't exist.

    Also, to the AC in this comments thread who redundantly posts that it was actually 670 voters of 3,704 registered voters, you should know that on election day, the aforementioned Secretary of State's own website showed that Mud Creek only had 276 registered voters. Magically after 670 votes were cast in Mud Creek, the Secretary of State's website was changed to say that there were actually 3,704 registered voters and not 276 as previously stated. Mud Creek's total population as of the 2010 census was fewer than 2,000 souls (men, women and children).

    • Re:Never forget (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09, 2018 @12:28AM (#57094960)

      Mud Creek voting district is not the same as the Mud Creek census area. In this case it is the name of one of the five voting precincts in Habersham county.

      What happened is that Habersham county changed the voting districts twice in the last few years. It went from 14 to 2 and then in 2016 to 5 voting precincts.
      In the 2016 election, Habersham county had 20,380 registered voters of which 13,890 actually voted. Voting districts tend to be areas containing the same number of people, so a fifth of 20,380 registered is about 4,166, and a fifth of 13,890 would be about 2,778.

      The 276 on the state's web server is was probably left over from when Habersham county had 14 precincts or may be just a typo. That number is supposed to get updated by the local people. The low turnout is due to the fact that it was a primary election.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by PopeRatzo ( 965947 )

        What happened is that Habersham county changed the voting districts twice in the last few years. It went from 14 to 2 and then in 2016 to 5 voting precincts.
        In the 2016 election, Habersham county had 20,380 registered voters of which 13,890 actually voted. Voting districts tend to be areas containing the same number of people, so a fifth of 20,380 registered is about 4,166, and a fifth of 13,890 would be about 2,778.

        That's entirely conjecture. All I did was state the facts clearly. Your narrative doesn't

  • by CptJeanLuc ( 1889586 ) on Thursday August 09, 2018 @03:16AM (#57095242)

    Here is how one could set up electronic voting. The challenge: votes are anonymous, but transparency in the voting process is needed. How to handle both. Here is the process as I see it:

    TL;DR: A public ledger of non-person-identifiable votes that were cast, a system for voters to identify "their" vote and prove whether it was registered correctly, as well as a public register of who casted votes (the vote is still secret) in order to help prevent fake votes from being cast. All enabled through some randomness and cryptographic signatures.

    • There needs to be a public register of "who voted". Though voting is anonymous, the fact that you voted does not need to be. This enables accountability because the system cannot produce "fake votes" without significant risk, as they have to produce a person for each vote that is case, and this can be checked later.
    • You enter the voting booth. You select your vote (candidate X, abstain, pro/con Brexit, ...).
    • The system gives you a (very long) unique receipt number for the vote. You have to add some digits to that number yourself (so the system is not allowed to cheat in choosing a number). The resulting number becomes the "vote ID" for that vote.
    • Upon confirming the vote, the system signs the vote (vote ID + vote), and provides a signature to the voter (also available in the form of e.g. a QR code), signed with a private key for that voting maching (which is at the end point of some trust chain). Also, it provides a signature of only vote ID
    • If the voter wants, (s)he could e.g. use a mobile app to scan the signatures, to store them and to verify it has been signed, as proof that the signature is valid, so that it can be used as proof that (a) the vote was delivered (vote ID only), or that a vote was cast in a particular way (vote ID + vote).
    • The vote ID, the vote and the signatures are printed as a paper receipts for the voter and for the vote handling organization, to ensure there is a paper trail that cannot be tampered with. If tree hugging is an issue, print on recycled diapers or something like that. Voters are requested to retain their receipt (helpful in case of later having to do some random checking of the integrity of the election).
    • When voting ends, all votes are published publically in the form of (vote ID + vote). This allows counting votes and identifying unique votes, however only the voters know which vote is his/her vote.
    • There is now accountability, because voters can find "their" vote in the ledger, and check whether it has tracked the correct vote. If not, they have proof (in the form of a cryptographic signature) that it is invalid.
    • Post-election, notifications are sent to all registered voters, that they have been registered in the system (which helps prevent fraud that people are casting votes in your name, in the name of dead people, etc)

    So this kind of setup would make it very risky to try to generate fake votes, as well as allowing the integrity of the votes to be verified after the fact.

    Not bad for 5 minutes of thinking (plus some time to refine the idea while typing it up). I am sure some really smart heads could cook up something even better, but this is already miles beyond whatever they have going on in Georgia.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There is now accountability, because voters can find "their" vote in the ledger, and check whether it has tracked the correct vote.

      Show me you voted the way I ordered you to or face the consequences. If you can verify your vote someone willing to threaten people can influence the elections. That is not what you want, and the anonymity requirement should cover this situation. Your idea is not good enough.

    • The vote ID, the vote and the signatures are printed as a paper receipts for the voter and for the vote handling organization, to ensure there is a paper trail that

      What you've described is pretty close to what most people actually have now, just the reverse (i.e., now people take a scan-tron and pass it into a scanner, rather than filing out a screen and printing a receipt). The main difference is that your system has the additional possibility of verifying the result of your own vote after the fact. But

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Any system that allows you to check if you voted correctly allows a third party to coerce you into proving how you voted. That allows family, friends, employers, religious leaders etc to demand that people vote the "right way", and encourages the buying of votes by allowing the buyer to verify that they are paying for a real vote.

      For democracy to function, it needs to be anonymous, verifiable and SECRET. Paper ballots plus observers hit all three, and scales perfectly well to any size of population.

  • by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Thursday August 09, 2018 @03:30AM (#57095274)

    "George is one of four states in the U.S. that continues to use voting machines with no ability to provide voters a paper record so that they can verify the machine counted their vote correctly," the report adds.

    I'm curious where this state of "George" is?

    • by T.E.D. ( 34228 )
      It used to be the state of "Georgia", but when it got taken over by the geniuses who instituted the current voting system, the first thing they did was what they'd always dreamed of doing when they got their own special state, they named it "George". Followed closely by "Hugging and petting him and squeezing him."
  • Lets get rid of the electoral college so Georgia can decide our presidential elections. 10 billion votes out of 243, why not?

  • 180% of the Georgian residents questioned said that they were happy with it, so there you go - it's the will of the people
  • Everyone knows a million ways to fix this and nearly all of them are better than what we're currently doing.

  • by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Thursday August 09, 2018 @08:27AM (#57095898) Journal
    They just stopped the recount when it got a bit embarrassing.

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