UPDATE: I forgot to include some information about the voting system used in Philadelphia, the Danaher Shouptronic. The Shouptronic was one of the machines that recorded very high undervotes in the 2004 Presidential in New Mexico, which undervote rate went down considerably in 2006, after the state switched to a paper ballot/optical scan system. - Midwest Millian
So it's hard to see how the Pennsylvania primary could be more important. Even the difference of a few points in the margin of victory could prove crucial in determining the course of the Democratic primary campaign.
It's also hard to see how the Pennsylvania primary could be less verifiable. Of the state's 8.3 million registered voters, over 85% live in jurisdictions that use only paperless e-voting at the polls.
We've heard this before in the 2008 primary season: a key state in the Presidential nominating process will conduct a primary election in which most votes are recorded and counted by paperless electronic voting machines.
First, it was South Carolina, but that was such a blowout that no one worried about it too much. Plus, the candidates who won in both parties were expected to win. Then Georgia, Louisiana, Virginia, and Maryland, where e-voting is the universal system, or, in the case of Virginia, the system that counts by far the most votes. But all those states went pretty much as expected, so no one paid too much attention to the fact that a real recount was impossible.
Texas was a little different, but Hillary was largely predicted to win the primary vote, and did, though Obama won the overall delegate share.
But Pennsylvania...no one really knows what to expect any more, do they? See LarsThorwald's diary on the rec list.
About 32% of voters in the Keystone State will depend on the ol' ES&S iVotronic, a touch screen voting system which... which.... just sucks. Bad. Some of the following was also contained in a diary I wrote on South Carolina earlier this year.
This is what Edward Felten, head of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, said about the ES&S iVotronic:
"Even if you don’t think anyone would try to steal an election, this should still scare you. A machine with so many design errors must also be susceptible to misrecording or miscounting votes due to the ordinary glitches and errors that always plague computer systems. Even if all poll workers and voters were angels,this machine would be too risky to use."
The Ohio academic review team found that the iVotronic's internal memory can be accessed, and its firmware compromised, by a person using magnet and personal digital assistant - see page 69 of the pdf (page 51 of the physical document):
Anyone with physical access to polling station PEBs can easily extract or alter their memory. This requires only a small magnet and a conventional IrDA-based palmtop computer (exactly the same kind of readilyavailable hardware that can be used to emulate a PEB to an iVotronic terminal). Because PEBs themselves enforce no passwords or access control features, physical contact with a PEB (or sufficient proximity to activate its magnetic switch and IR window) is sufficient to allow reading or writing of its memory. The ease of reading and altering PEB memory facilitates a number of powerful attacks against a precinct's results and even against county-wide results. An attacker who extracts the correct EQC, cryptographic key, and ballot definition can perform any election function on a corresponding iVotronic terminal, including enabling voting, closing the terminal, loading firmware, and so on.
How difficult would potential attackers find it to actually do this?
Page 22 of the academic report pdf (document page 4):
"The review teams were able to subvert every voting system we were provided in ways that would often lead to undetectable manipulation of election results. We were able to develop this knowledge within a few weeks. However, most of the problems that we found could have been identified with only limited access to voting equipment. Thus, it is safe to assume that motivated attackers will quickly identify - or already have- these and many other issues in these systems. Any argument that suggests that the attacker will somehow be less capable or knowledgeable than the reviewer teams, or that they will not be able to reverse engineer the systems to expose security flaws is not grounded in fact."
Not that we should pick on the iVotronic. The other systems used in Pennsylvania are no less cause for concern. Each has its own little issues, but a lack of verifiabilty is the fundamental one. Check out the Verified Voting Foundation article.
What to do? Call your Congressperson and call for HR 5036 to be brought to the floor of the House on the regular calendar; a motion to bring it up on a suspension vote failed last week.
HR 5036 provides funding to counties and state that want to switch voting systems in time for November. HR 5036 could do a lot of good in PA; there are counties, including big ones, that may switch to paper ballots and optical scan if they have the cash to do so. 5036 is far from perfect; it is opt-in, and it would also pay for unreliable reel-to-reel printers. But it would also fund random hand audits of vote tallies, emergency paper ballots, and paper ballot/optical scan systems.
Click here to send a letter to Congress in support of HR 5036. The letter includes reference to the unreliability of reel-to-reel thermal paper printers and the superiority of paper ballots.
Finally, let your Party know that you just aren't going to take this anymore. Demand action, especially if you live in a state that uses paperless e-voting machines. You could also drop the front-pagers here a line and ask them to start posting on the issue:) They may be gun-shy after the fraud wars of years past, but this is about future elections. And if you don't think that future elections are in real jeopardy, start here for the most recent take, and then go here, and then here, and here, and here, and here, and here
That's all I got for today, folks. See you all when Indiana's paperless primary comes around! YAY! Somehow my sense of hope, and my liver (watching election returns is just No Fun At All when the election in question has no paper ballots and/or no audits of the results), will survive unverifiable elections in the U.S.
