States junking electronic voting

Good day all. In less then 24 hours, voting will begin to replace or confirm the current members of the House of Representatives, on third of the United States Senate and a number of governors, mayors and state legislators around the nation.

One of the things that has been going on the last couple of elections is the return of paper ballots. This would seem to buck the trend of using electronic voting machines in order to “Secure the vote” and avoid ballot box stuffing and those wonderful “Hanging chads.” However, as we have seen, the electronic voting machines turned out not or be either secure or reliable with a few “Miscalibrated” in such a way as to reward Republican votes to Democrats. Now, states are ditching the “Modern” voting machines and returning to the tried and true methods. Here are the details from The Hill:

States have abandoned electronic voting machines in droves, ensuring that most voters will be casting their ballots by hand on Election Day. With many electronic voting machines more than a decade old, and states lacking the funding to repair or replace them, officials have opted to return to the pencil-and-paper voting that the new technology was supposed to replace.

The location that I vote in has always used a paper ballot and a pencil. I don’t know of any cities in New Hampshire that went the electronic route, although I may be mistaken.

Nearly 70 percent of voters will be casting ballots by hand on Tuesday, according to Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog Verified Voting.

“Paper, even though it sounds kind of old school, it actually has properties that serve the elections really well,” Smith said. It’s an outcome few would have predicted after the 2000 election, when the battle over “hanging chads” in the Florida recount spurred a massive, $3 billion federal investment in electronic voting machines.

And like most federal “investments, it was pretty much a waste of money.

States at the time ditched punch cards and levers in favor of touch screens and ballot-scanners, with the perennial battleground state of Ohio spending $115 million alone on upgrades. Smith said the mid-2000s might go down as the “heyday” of electronic voting.

Yeah, about those touch screen voting machines? Those are the ones that have been having those “configuration issues” that I wrote about a while ago. One of the reasons for these “configuration” issues is costs.

Since then, states have failed to maintain the machines, partly due to budget shortfalls. “There is simply no money to replace them,” said Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined computerized voting systems in six states.

The lack of spending on the machines is a major problem because the electronic equipment wears out quickly. Smith recalled sitting in a meeting with Missouri election officials in 2012, where they complained 25 percent of their equipment had malfunctioned in preelection testing. “You’re dealing with voting machines that are more than a decade old,” Smith said.

Now how many people are still using computers and cellphones from 10 or more years ago? Ok, I have a couple of computers kicking around from that era, but I don’t use them for anything important. There isn’t much of an outcry from the voters to upgrade/repair these antiques either.

Some voters might welcome the return to punch voting, given that researchers have repeatedly proved the fallibility of individual e-voting machines.

Another issue with these machines is the ease with which they can be tampered with.

One group from Princeton needed only seven minutes and simple hacking tools to install a computer program on a voting machine that took votes for one candidate and gave them to another.

Gee, why does taking votes from one candidate and giving them to another sound SO familiar?

More whimsically, two researchers showed they could install Pac-Man onto a touch-screen voting machine, leaving no detectable traces of their presence.

I will be the first to admit that hundreds of people going into a voting booth and then hearing the “wacka-wacka-wacka” sound from Pacman could be more entertaining then holding my nose and picking the candidate least likely to hurt me. Still, we must do our civic duties as American Citizens and elect yet another bunch of no talent, incompetent boobs to office. Having to use a voting machine that can’t be trusted is not conducive to an open and honest election.

But concerns of widespread tampering are overblown, Shamos said. “It’s something you can demonstrate under lab conditions,” he said. To translate it to an election-altering hack, “you would have to commit the perfect crime.” “There’s never been a proven case of manipulation of an electronic voting machine,” he said.

Haven’t been reading the news ((North Carolina voters report voting machines switching their votes to GOP candidate)), ((Md. Board of Elections Probe Republican-To-Democratic Ballot Switch Claims)), ((Illinois Voting Machines Switching Votes to the Democrat Candidate)) have you Mr. Shamos?

“These machines are not hooked up or networked in any way that would make them vulnerable to external access,” said Matt McClellan, press secretary for the Ohio Secretary of State. “We’re confident that process is secure and the integrity is being maintained.”

“There’s no mechanism whereby viruses can pass from one machine to another,” Shamos agreed. Best case scenario, “maybe I could fool a few people” and get several hundred votes “for my guy.”

Really? No possible way? How about the people who are doing the testing, repairs and certifications? They could hand load a virus into the machines to reprogram them at a specific time. And before you say that can’t be done, you might want to ask the Iranians about their centrifuges and the Stuxnet virus. If they are patching and upgrading, even the techs doing the actual wouldn’t have to be “In on it.” All it would take is someone gaining access to their tools and software patches and “Congratulations President Elect Obama!”

Then there is the problem of an audit trail. How do you proves the vote is actually real? That requires, wait for it, a paper receipt of some sort that the election monitors can look at.

An electronic machine in North Carolina lost roughly 4,500 votes in a 2004 statewide race after it simply stopped recording votes. The race was ultimately decided by fewer than 2,000 votes.

“Now what do you do?” Smith asked. “You can’t really do a recount. There’s nothing to count.”

Within a year, the state passed a law requiring a paper backup.

Paper trails are simply “more resilient,” Smith said.

Hey, I know! How about we use a far more resilient system? We can use “Paper Ballots!” While I don’t really have a problem with electronic voting, experience has shown that the systems just aren’t ready fro prime time. They aren’t trustworthy, they break down easily and they are expensive to buy and maintain. Security on them can be a nightmare. With a paper ballot, you can easily verify the votes.

First, when the ballot boxes are brought into the polls, they are opened and physically examined with witnesses and cameras to show they are empty. They are then closed up and sealed with some sort of marker to show they have been checked and verified as empty and then placed under guard. I have perfect man for the job too.

The ballot counters are a time tested system, either mechanical or physical. If a recount is required, well, you have the physical ballots and you can either rescan them or manually check them. It works and with modern security systems, you can tell if someone is trying to stuff them. Paper ballots and mechanical voting machines are also totally immune to Solar flares and EMP ((Electromagnetic pulse)) attacks. And to make sure people don’t try and vote twice, first mandatory voter ID, then make use of the “Purple Finger ((Purple Revolution))” when a voter submits his or her ballot.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

[yasr_visitor_votes size=”medium”]