National: Congressional hearing sought over voter ID laws sweeping states | McClatchy
Does requiring a photo ID to vote return America to the days when poll taxes and literacy tests made it hard for minorities to cast ballots? Are state lawmakers trying to make it harder for people to vote? Two top House Judiciary Committee Democrats want to know, and on Monday they asked Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, to hold hearings on those laws, which have been adopted or are pending in 37 states. The chairman is reviewing the request, and he had no immediate comment.
“As voting rights experts have noted, the recent stream of laws passed at the state level are a reversal of policies, both federal and state, that were intended to combat voter disenfranchisement and boost voter participation,” said Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. Conyers is the committee’s top Democrat. Nadler is the top Democrat on its Constitution subcommittee. Read More
National: E-voting remains insecure, despite paper trail | InfoWorld
Microsoft Research has revealed a potential flaw in verifiable e-voting machines through which fraudsters could easily use discarded ballot receipts as a guide for altering votes. Fortunately, the researchers also offered a solution — linking new receipts to previous ones with cryptographic hashes — but that alone won’t make e-voting entirely secure, they cautioned.
Unlike the first generation of controversial e-voting machines, which lacked printing capabilities and suffered other back-endinsecurities, new models from such companies as Scantegrity, Prêt à Voter, VeriScan, Helios, and MarkPledge can print out receipts. Not only can voters check the printouts to confirm their votes were cast correctly, they can also later compare their receipts against published election data.
The problem with the new generation of verifiable voting machines, according to the report (PDF), is that most people are highly unlikely to retain their receipts for future vote verification. However, ill-intentioned individuals could get their hands on those receipts — by rummaging through garbage cans at voting centers, for example, or through social engineering techniques — then use insider connections to change votes to their preferred candidate.
Using the discarded receipts as a guide for changing votes would be ideal, as they would represent voters with no intention of verifying their votes later. “Suppose that it is known that 5 percent of voters are expected to verify their receipts in an election,” the report says. “With a standard design, an insider that randomly alters 10 ballots would escape detection about 60 percent of the time.” Read More
National: Microsoft Research Proposes E-Voting Attack Mitigation | threatpost
Microsoft Research has proposed a mitigation for a known potential attack against verifiable electronic voting machines that could help prevent insiders from being able to alter votes after the fact. The countermeasure to the “trash attack” involves adding a cryptographic hash to the receipts that voters receive.
Many verifiable voting systems already include hashes on the receipts, but that hash typically is of the ballot data for each specific voter. The idea proposed by Microsoft Research involves using a running hash that would add a hash of the previous voter’s receipt to each person’s receipt, ideally preventing a privileged insider from using discarded receipts to alter votes.
