[Engineering Feature]
The Ballot Is Open On Electronic Voting
E-voting will play a key role in the upcoming U.S. national election, despite ongoing charges that electronic voting machines are rife with security flaws and may be susceptible to EMI.
California announced in August that it had certified Diebold's AccuVote-TS touchscreen system firmware and software for the November election and that two counties, Alameda and Plumas, will use the system in November. Both counties used the system in the 2002 gubernatorial election. Los Angeles County, the largest county in the U.S., also will use the AccuVote-TS system for early voting. Hart InterCivic, which had no customers for its eSlate system in 2000, sold the system to five counties in Texas and at least one county in five other states for November's election.
Much of the concern surrounding these machines is that they don't provide a paper trail of votes cast. Sequoia says the VeriVote printer upgrade of its AVC Edge system, which lets voters view a paper copy of their electronic ballot before leaving the polling place, has successfully passed federal testing and was used throughout Nevada in its September primary. It will be employed again in November.
The printer is mounted beside the touchscreen and displays the voter's selections behind glass so neither voters nor poll workers can physically remove or alter the paper record. Diebold also provides a voter-verified paper audit trail as an option for its AccuVote-TS. California has required printers for all touchscreen machines used in the state after July 1, 2006.
TECHNICAL STANDARDS? With no national technical standards for e-voting machines, the IEEE has formed a group known as Project 1538 to create a standard for the evaluation of voting equipment. Essentially, 1538 will develop a standard of requirements and methods for election voting equipment. It won't specify how these machines should be designed or produced. The group's work won't be completed in time to have any impact on this year's general election.
Eventually, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), established by Congress under HAVA to develop technical guidelines for voting machinery, is expected to accept the IEEE group's recommendations as a national standard. One of the goals of Project 1538 will be to define electromagnetic-interference (EMI) requirements in e-voting machines.
William A. Radasky, president of Metatech Corp., which specializes in analyzing EMI disturbances and their effects on electronic systems and subsystems, is heading a group within the IEEE EMC Society to study the potential for intentional interference against publicly accessible computing systems—including e-voting machines. "I personally believe that EMI could be a problem for voting machines, especially cell-phone interference," he says. "It's just a matter of knowing where to place the phone."
Radasky's group expects to develop procedures that he hopes will dovetail with the work being done by Project 1583. The group will also look at cell phones. They can do the most damage, Radasky says, when their towers are a great distance from e-voting machines. That's because they will have to work at a higher power, or transmission level, to find a signal. According to Radasky, cell phones can get up to 5 V per meter within a few inches of an e-voting machine.
"You're not going to change any votes, but you could probably shut down the machine. You could prevent people from voting," Radasky says. He adds that his group's work on intentional interference is just starting. "We haven't even had a formal meeting yet, and we expect our effort to take about five years."
NEXT-GENERATION E-VOTING Can any of this be fixed? One possible solution is so-called "verified voting," using a printer attached to the e-voting machine to generate a hard copy of a voter's choice. But there's also a fear that printers, like the voting terminals, can be tampered with because they are simply paper ballots.
Votegrity, a company founded recently by cryptographer David Chaum, came up with a system of encrypted strips of paper generated by a printer attached to an e-voting machine. The printer enables voters to confirm that their votes were counted before they leave the voting booth. They simply check a serial number on the receipt against decrypted data on the Web. It also allows voters to keep a printed copy of their vote, as a sort of receipt.
ES&S says it's testing a touchscreen machine called AutoMark that will be ready for use early next year. The machine can produce marked paper ballots, which are then run through a scanner that can count both the AutoMark ballots and those that were marked by hand.
Another possibility is optical scanning technology, such as the InkaVote system produced by Election Data Corp. This system substitutes pen marks on paper for punched holes. Voters can check the cards before they leave the polling booth to ensure their votes are registered accurately. InkaVote has been tested and certified in California. In fact, Los Angeles County ordered 45,000 of these units for November.
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