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Someone with more knowledge of this please tell me: Why is physical access to the voting machine innards allowed at all? Why isn't the machine glued shut with

Someone with more knowledge of this please tell me: Why is physical access to the voting machine innards allowed at all? Why isn't the machine glued shut with some color changing seals to show tampering? It doesn't seem like poll workers (or anyone other than the manufacturer, for that matter) would need access to the internals. If a machine is broken, send it back or fall back to paper voting.

specialist 15y ago
The short answer is all the election administration gear is rushed to market. The HAVA boondoogle created a gold fever land grab mentality. The products are shit. Not just insecure, but just complete garbage. Not to downplay the security concerns, but the poor reliability is a bigger threat. Especially since these systems fail silently and "testing" was a puppet show. The longer answer is that all voting gear I've seen (in the USA) treat security as an afterthought. Gear in use typically get "tamper evident" seals. But they're really lame (e.g. fall off) or the gear can be backdoored. I'm just talking the hardware here. The software situation is totally, scales of magnitude, worse.
rhizome 15y ago
For no particular reason, the prevailing stance is to avoid paper fallback so they want to preserve the ability for pollworkers to deal with problems themselves. I know, "what could possibly go wrong with that?" There is nothing in the electronic voting debate that won't make you scratch your head wondering why they don't use known-good techniques. The only time-worthy thing to do is to oppose them until open-source solutions are accepted. Everything else will be a through-and-through scam by Diebold or one of their cohorts.
- jerf 15y ago
  "The only time-worthy thing to do is to oppose them until open-source solutions are accepted." Meh, I'm still unconvinced by the virtues of electronic voting at all, open source or otherwise. Little electronic currents simply have less mass than pencil marks on paper, and I mean that in a number of ways, including the fully literal one. A full accounting of cost/benefits shows the costs to be staggering once one accounts for the risks of tampering and the difficulty of preventing it, and the benefits mind-bogglingly tiny. (Heck, even if one merely accounts for the costs of materials the cost/benefit analysis isn't all that great.) If it wasn't so darned shiny and high tech nobody would even consider electronic voting. It's just technofetishism run amok.
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    > If it wasn't so darned shiny and high tech nobody would even consider electronic voting. Were you in a Nepalese monastery during the 2000 election or something?
    - jerf 15y ago
      See, that's an example of what I mean. You simple take it as given that technology will simply solve the problem by virtue of being TECHNOLOGICAL, when a moment's thought starts poking huge gaping holes in logic. Suppose Florida is a close race again in alt-2000 where electronic voting is widespread. But wait! In three precincts, close examination of the voting machines reveals that they have been systematically tampered with, in exactly the way described in this article, and the voting totals are unreliable. Aaaaaandd... ... now what? Count the ballots again? Can't. No such thing. Re-add the wrong numbers together for the wrong result? Hold the vote again in those precincts? That's fraught with its own serious problems. The vote is just screwed and there's basically nothing you can do about it. "But the vote can be screwed with paper ballots too!" Yes, but it's much harder, leaves a much larger and harder to forge trail, requires vastly more effort, and is much easier to detect. (Ye olde "Benford's Law" trick will work only once, you know.) The question isn't whether computer voting "works", it's whether it's better. And, secretly, I palmed a card. I tampered with those voting machines after the vote occurred. The vote numbers are totally accurate in my hypothetical scenario! But good luck proving that in real life. One thing that people don't often get is that voting isn't about choosing a winner. Choosing winners is easy. It's about convincing the losers that they lost, and that the process is fair, and it's far better for them to participate in the Great Debate and sway people to their position and try to win the next election, rather than forming an armed mob and going on a rampage. Electronic voting machines make that outcome much harder. For once, Hollywood-hackability works on our side and the pervasive message that all computers are intrinsically infinitely hackable is not so far from the truth. (... oh, and if you stay tuned for long enough, we'll be able to answer that "Now What?" question sooner or later, because it is only a matter of time before the body politic is literally faced with that question, instead of merely hypothetically.)
      - 15y ago
- wnight 15y ago
  > There is nothing in the electronic voting debate that won't make you scratch your head wondering why they don't use known-good techniques. Corruption. Large cash payouts to Diebold execs. The literal intent to commit treason and rig the USA's presidential elections. How else can a company capable of making ATMs that don't leak cash create such a laughable amateur attempt at an e-voting machine. Furthermore, even if the creation of these criminally bad products was an accident almost every expert in crypto/security and election theory has stepped up to say that every element of the systems is broken, from the hardware having holes to the goals being impossible even in theory. If this didn't go high up any single weakness found would have been enough to pull every Diebold voting machine. As is there are more regulations against lawn-darts...
  - aptwebapps 15y ago
    Their ATM machines are far from impregnable. They're harder to hack than the voting machines because the banks require it, but they aren't foolproof. Diebold's clients when selling voting machines are often county clerks or county commissioners. Sometimes they are secretaries of state. They aren't capable, for the most part, of assessing the machines. (The ones that are might find better alternatives). When they sell atm machines their clients are banks and when they lose money due to problems with the machines, they usually find out. They've been making a killing out of selling this crap, pure and simple.
sixtofour 15y ago
The reason there is no tamper proofing is that it would make tampering more difficult.

specialist 15y ago

The short answer is all the election administration gear is rushed to market. The HAVA boondoogle created a gold fever land grab mentality. The products are shit. Not just insecure, but just complete garbage. Not to downplay the security concerns, but the poor reliability is a bigger threat. Especially since these systems fail silently and "testing" was a puppet show. The longer answer is that all voting gear I've seen (in the USA) treat security as an afterthought. Gear in use typically get "tamper evident" seals. But they're really lame (e.g. fall off) or the gear can be backdoored. I'm just talking the hardware here. The software situation is totally, scales of magnitude, worse.

rhizome 15y ago

For no particular reason, the prevailing stance is to avoid paper fallback so they want to preserve the ability for pollworkers to deal with problems themselves. I know, "what could possibly go wrong with that?" There is nothing in the electronic voting debate that won't make you scratch your head wondering why they don't use known-good techniques. The only time-worthy thing to do is to oppose them until open-source solutions are accepted. Everything else will be a through-and-through scam by Diebold or one of their cohorts.

jerf 15y ago
"The only time-worthy thing to do is to oppose them until open-source solutions are accepted." Meh, I'm still unconvinced by the virtues of electronic voting at all, open source or otherwise. Little electronic currents simply have less mass than pencil marks on paper, and I mean that in a number of ways, including the fully literal one. A full accounting of cost/benefits shows the costs to be staggering once one accounts for the risks of tampering and the difficulty of preventing it, and the benefits mind-bogglingly tiny. (Heck, even if one merely accounts for the costs of materials the cost/benefit analysis isn't all that great.) If it wasn't so darned shiny and high tech nobody would even consider electronic voting. It's just technofetishism run amok.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  > If it wasn't so darned shiny and high tech nobody would even consider electronic voting. Were you in a Nepalese monastery during the 2000 election or something?
  - jerf 15y ago
    See, that's an example of what I mean. You simple take it as given that technology will simply solve the problem by virtue of being TECHNOLOGICAL, when a moment's thought starts poking huge gaping holes in logic. Suppose Florida is a close race again in alt-2000 where electronic voting is widespread. But wait! In three precincts, close examination of the voting machines reveals that they have been systematically tampered with, in exactly the way described in this article, and the voting totals are unreliable. Aaaaaandd... ... now what? Count the ballots again? Can't. No such thing. Re-add the wrong numbers together for the wrong result? Hold the vote again in those precincts? That's fraught with its own serious problems. The vote is just screwed and there's basically nothing you can do about it. "But the vote can be screwed with paper ballots too!" Yes, but it's much harder, leaves a much larger and harder to forge trail, requires vastly more effort, and is much easier to detect. (Ye olde "Benford's Law" trick will work only once, you know.) The question isn't whether computer voting "works", it's whether it's better. And, secretly, I palmed a card. I tampered with those voting machines after the vote occurred. The vote numbers are totally accurate in my hypothetical scenario! But good luck proving that in real life. One thing that people don't often get is that voting isn't about choosing a winner. Choosing winners is easy. It's about convincing the losers that they lost, and that the process is fair, and it's far better for them to participate in the Great Debate and sway people to their position and try to win the next election, rather than forming an armed mob and going on a rampage. Electronic voting machines make that outcome much harder. For once, Hollywood-hackability works on our side and the pervasive message that all computers are intrinsically infinitely hackable is not so far from the truth. (... oh, and if you stay tuned for long enough, we'll be able to answer that "Now What?" question sooner or later, because it is only a matter of time before the body politic is literally faced with that question, instead of merely hypothetically.)
    - 15y ago
wnight 15y ago
> There is nothing in the electronic voting debate that won't make you scratch your head wondering why they don't use known-good techniques. Corruption. Large cash payouts to Diebold execs. The literal intent to commit treason and rig the USA's presidential elections. How else can a company capable of making ATMs that don't leak cash create such a laughable amateur attempt at an e-voting machine. Furthermore, even if the creation of these criminally bad products was an accident almost every expert in crypto/security and election theory has stepped up to say that every element of the systems is broken, from the hardware having holes to the goals being impossible even in theory. If this didn't go high up any single weakness found would have been enough to pull every Diebold voting machine. As is there are more regulations against lawn-darts...
- aptwebapps 15y ago
  Their ATM machines are far from impregnable. They're harder to hack than the voting machines because the banks require it, but they aren't foolproof. Diebold's clients when selling voting machines are often county clerks or county commissioners. Sometimes they are secretaries of state. They aren't capable, for the most part, of assessing the machines. (The ones that are might find better alternatives). When they sell atm machines their clients are banks and when they lose money due to problems with the machines, they usually find out. They've been making a killing out of selling this crap, pure and simple.

sixtofour 15y ago

The reason there is no tamper proofing is that it would make tampering more difficult.