Kenya: Electoral Commission to invite hackers to ‘invade’ its systems | nation.co.ke

Do you consider yourself an IT hacker? Then the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission will soon be looking for you. In November, the IEBC plans to invite hackers to try tamper with the system that it will use to transmit provisional results. According to IEBC CEO James Oswago, this will help the system attract the confidence of Kenyans ahead of the planned March 4, 2013 General Elections. “We are confident that our system is tamper-proof. However, sometime in November we will invite those who think they can hack into the system to do it. We want Kenyans to have confidence in the system,” Mr Oswago said. According to Mr Oswago, this is one of the lessons that the Commission has learnt from engagement with electoral bodies that use such systems.

Bulgaria: Opposition criticises online voting | FOCUS

The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) thinks that the electronic voting hides too many risks, said Mladen Chervenyakov, Chairperson of the BSP National Council, speaking at a press conference on Monday, organised to present socialists’ ideas for amendments to the Elections Code, FOCUS News Agency reporter informs. In Chervenyakov’s words, the Bulgarians are good hackers, adding that there were too high concerns that the online voting could be manipulated.

Canada: Nova Scotia Business Inc. invests $800,000 in Dartmouth e-voting company | The Chronicle Herald

A Dartmouth electronic voting company is looking to increase its share of the national market, and has received a funding boost from the province. Nova Scotia Business Inc. announced Friday that it has submitted a venture capital investment of $800,000 to Intelivote Systems Inc., located in Burnside Park. Dean Smith, company president and founder, said Intelivote has signed up 15 of the 16 municipalities in Nova Scotia that will be offering telephone and Internet voting in municipal elections this fall., including Digby, Yarmouth, Kentville and Truro. Barcelona-based Scytl Secure Electronic Voting is handling the election in Halifax Regional Municipality.

National: Book review: Broken Ballots | ZDNet UK

Few people — the security expert Rebecca Mercuri being the notable exception — thought much about the mechanics of voting before the Bush-versus-Gore presidential election in 2000. A few weeks of watching diligent poll workers holding up ballots to look for hanging chads changed all that. The timing — coincidental with both the rise of the internet and the dot-com bust — suddenly put voting technology on everyone’s agenda. The UK, like a number of European countries, had a brief flirtation with electronic voting. Notably, the Netherlands reverted to pencil-and-paper after a group of technical experts proved their point by getting the voting machines to play chess. E-counting is still on the UK’s agenda, however, despite objections from the Open Rights Group on technical and cost grounds. Most recently, it was used in London’s May 2012 mayoral elections. In the US, Bush v. Gore led to the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which mandated the updating of voting equipment and set off substantial controversy.

Ireland: Defunct e-voting machines for sale at €100 for charity | The Irish Times

The first batch of defunct electronic-voting machines are due to be collected in Wexford this morning and the winning bidder has revealed how he secured the devices. Managing director of Co Offaly-based KMK Metals Recycling, Kurt Kyck, claims his bid of just over €70,000 was unique in that KMK was willing to buy the machines. He doesn’t believe the other six applicants offered to pay the Government to take the €50 million machines away. While listening to an interview with Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan, Mr Kyck said he realised the other bidders “would have charged the Government to take them”.

Mongolia: 9 parties demand vote recount of Mongolia elections | GlobalPost

Nine political parties in Mongolia, including the ruling Mongolian People’s Party, have signed a petition demanding a vote recount and rejecting as unconstitutional an electronic voting system used for the time in the country’s parliamentary elections on Thursday. The automated system was introduced to ensure Mongolia’s elections were free of corruption, but it has been plagued by technical problems and results that were supposed to be announced hours after polling stations closed two days ago are yet to be made public. According to Al Jazeera, the Mongolian People’s Party and eight smaller parties are calling for a vote recount and for a return to the old way of counting votes by hand.

Ireland: E-voting machines scrapped for €70,000 | The Irish Times

In a final vote of no confidence, Ireland’s ill-fated e-voting machines are finally headed to the scrap heap. An Offaly-based firm, KMK Metals Recycling, was declared the Government’s preferred bidder out of seven tenders. The company paid a mere €70,267 for the machines – a steal when one considers the €55 million they have cost the State to date. The price paid also works out at just half the annual €140,000 cost of storing them. Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan said he was “glad to bring this sorry episode to a conclusion on behalf of the taxpayer”. “From the outset, this project was ill-conceived and poorly delivered by my political predecessors and as a result it has cost the taxpayer €55 million. “While this is a scandalous waste of public money, I am happy to say that we will not incur any further costs in the disposal of the machines,” he said.

Colorado: Technological problem delayed Tuesday’s vote tally in Pitkin County | AspenTimes.com

Though turnout in Tuesday’s election was light, the unofficial results couldn’t be released until nearly 1 a.m. because of a technological issue, Pitkin County elections manager Dwight Shellman III said Wednesday. The polls for the election, which featured a four-man open primary for the District 4 seat on the Board of County Commissioners, closed at 7 p.m. Nearly six hours later, after Shellman worked around the technology problem, the unofficial results were released, showing that Capitol Creek rancher Steve Child and former Snowmass Village Town Manager John B. Young were the two top vote-getters in the race, pulling 666 and 524 votes respectively. … Shellman said he discovered the problem at around 10:30 p.m. after most of the mail-in and Election Day precinct votes had already been tabulated. Turnout in the election — which also featured party primaries for congressional District 3, the District 61 state representative and district attorney for the 9th Judicial District — was 21.4 percent, or 1,789 ballots cast out of 8,356 active registered voters. “Everything was going just great,” Shellman said. “We had two, as we customarily do, optical scan machines programmed for the mail-in ballots, and the first one I uploaded had the majority, 621 ballots. It uploaded without a problem. And then I went to upload the second one, 319 mail-in ballots, and our tabulation software was giving me an error saying, ‘You’ve already uploaded this memory card.’ I’ve never encountered this before.” Shellman said he’s not exactly sure why he got the error message.

Mongolia: Vote snags as ruling party seeks recount | Fox News

Calls by Mongolia’s ruling party for a recount of votes at some polling stations Friday delayed results in sharply contested legislative elections that centered on how to spread the wealth from the poor but fast-growing country’s mining boom. The Mongolia People’s Party said it asked for the recount because discrepancies turned up in vote totals tabulated by machines and then counted by hand at some polling stations. The request sent political leaders huddling with the General Election Commission, which had been expected to announce the results from Thursday’s voting on Friday morning.

Indiana: Lake County commissioner vote recount reaches third day | Dyer News

The 3rd District Lake County commissioner recount moved Wednesday from machine to paper balloting. The court-appointed, three-member recount commission finished inspecting 374 electronic voting machines used to tally votes cast in the Democratic primary for the race between North Township Board member Richard J. Novak and County Councilman Michael Repay. Novak is challenging the declaration of Repay as the official winner by 74 votes.

National: E- Voting: Trust but Verify | Scientific American

With the Presidential elections looming up, some have been asking why the United States is not making more of electronic voting. It’s being adopted in many other countries around the world, with India, Brazil, Estonia, Norway and Switzerland as notable examples.   However, the United States has several examples in recent years where it has backed out of electronic voting that it had already implemented. For example, in 2010, a trial system for remote voting over the Internet in Washington DC (known as the “Digital vote by mail”) was shown to be vulnerable, when it was penetrated by a research team from the University of Michigan, demonstrating how a real attack could render any results unsound, without detection. The attack was documented in a recent paper by researchers from the University of Michigan. So who is right?

Editorials: Hacking the vote | Rick Holmes/MetroWest Daily News

Many questions hang over the 2012 election. What will the unemployment rate be, and will it hurt Barack Obama’s prospects? How will Mitt Romney hold up in one-on-one debates? How will both candidates bridge the enthusiasm gaps in their parties’ bases? Who’ll control Congress? Will Scott Brown or Elizabeth Warren carry the day in Massachusetts? Here’s one Democrats are asking: Will new state actions requiring photo IDs for voters, purging voter rolls and restricting voter registration drives hurt their candidates? And here’s one almost no one wants to think about: Will the private companies who build and handle voting machines steal the election?

Editorials: Challenging the market power of one voting machine maker | Sean Flaherty/Iowa City Press Citizen

I am co-chairman of Iowans for Voting Integrity, a nonpartisan citizen group that works for voting systems worthy of the public trust. We have worked for six years for two reforms that both we and many of the world’s leading computer technologists consider essential to fair elections: First, we believe that all computer voting systems must provide a reliable paper record of every ballot cast, and Second, we believe that following every election, election officials should routinely conduct a manual tally of a sample of cast ballots to check against electronic tallies. This column revisits an issue well-known both to the small community of advocates and technology experts who work on electronic voting issues and to an untold number of conspiracy theorists around the nation, but largely unknown outside those communities. This issue is the centralized marked power of the nation’s leading vendor of election equipment and services, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), and the opacity of ES&S’s ownership. I’d like to share some highly judicious and disturbing comments about ES&S that I heard June 7 at a reading at Prairie Lights by University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas Jones. Along with his co-author Barbara Simons, Jones recently published an important book, “Broken Ballots.” The reading was livestreamed on the Internet, and and audio archive should be available soon.

California: Riverside County’s voting machines being used for spare parts | The Desert Sun

The roughly 3,700 electronic voting machines owned by Riverside County are locked in a warehouse, being scavenged for parts, with no plans to sell the multimillion-dollar equipment that was rendered idle by the stroke of a pen more than five years ago, a county official confirmed Wednesday. In August 2007, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified e-voting units in use in counties throughout the state following a series of security tests that revealed vulnerabilities in the machines that could leave them open to computer hack attacks. At the time, Riverside County’s Sequoia AVC Edge voting machines had been used in elections going back to 2000. County supervisors universally lauded e-voting, calling the practice a great time-saver with less risk for the type of errors that came to light in Florida following the 2000 presidential election. Members of election integrity group Save-R-Vote of Temecula Valley, a staunch opponent of e-voting, forecasted Bowen’s decision, with the head of the organization, Tom Courbat, recommending that the county sell its Sequoia units for pennies on the dollar to cut its losses. He was ignored.

United Kingdom: Politicians fail to attend electronic vote count demonstration in Belfast | BBC

Northern Ireland’s chief electoral officer has said he is disappointed that more politicians did not turn up for a demonstration of how electronic vote counting works. Only two MPs, a few local councillors and not a single MLA attended the event at Belfast City Hall on Thursday. Politicians were critical of counting times in the assembly and local government elections last May. Consultations with the parties on the new system are currently underway. But only two MPs, a handful of local councillors and not a single MLA were at Belfast City Hall for an e-counting demonstration – even though several indicated they would be there.

Voting Blogs: E-Counting the London Mayoral and Assembly Elections | Campaign Legal Center

Over the past few years, there has been some concern about the transparency of the counting process in American elections, especially where votes are cast and counted electronically. For instance, last spring in Waukesha County during the Wisconsin Supreme Court run-off, a last minute correction to a clerical error changed the results of the election. In March of this year, an electronic voting system mistakenly recorded two losing city council candidates in Palm Beach County, Florida as receiving the most votes. On May 3rd the people of Greater London went to the polls to elect a new mayor and local assembly. Voters marked their votes on paper ballots. At 8 am the next morning, poll workers began counting the votes electronically at three different locations across Greater London. The process used to count ballots allowed for a high degree of transparency in the count.

Ohio: Jefferson County: Election costs on the rise | HeraldStarOnline.com

Jefferson County commissioners Thursday agreed to appropriate more money to the county board of elections to cover increased expenses associated with the upcoming presidential election. Frank Bruzzese, board of elections board member, said presidential elections are always more expensive to conduct, especially this year when every voter will receive an application for an absentee ballot. The commissioners appropriated $605,000 to the board of elections, with the state contributing an additional $17,000 for mapping congressional districts. Bruzzese said the board of elections spent $746,000 four years ago during the presidential election. Commissioners agreed to appropriate an additional $102,000 to the board of elections, bringing the budget total to $722,000. Bruzzese said that should be enough to cover expenses associated with the general election in November.

National: Electronic voting 2012: Here we go again | Marketplace

Elections come and go and many issues change, but one seems to remain: electronic voting. Two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago — the story’s been about the same: the machines don’t seem ready for primetime, but we’re using them anyway. This week, the official verdict came back on some electronic vote-reading machines in the South Bronx that seemed a little fishy in the last congressional election, 2010. Larry Norden is with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and says sometimes the voting machine “was essentially overheating and because it was overheating, it was reading a lot of phantom votes — a vote that the voter didn’t actually cast, but that the machine saw.” The upshot is that in some districts in the Bronx, it turns out more than a third of votes weren’t counted. Things could get really scary in a state that’s gone all electronic, like South Carolina. University of South Carolina computer scientist Duncan Buell is worried for 2012: “I’m not sure there’s any real change from four years ago to now.” Seriously? What’s taking so long?

Florida: Despite state oversight, vote-counting errors abound in Florida | Palm Beach Post

Harri Hursti may be the best-known hacker you’ve never heard of. Largely unknown to the voting public, the Finnish computer programmer gained national notoriety among elections officials in 2005 when he broke into voting equipment in Leon County – at the supervisor of elections’ invitation – just to show it could be done. Hursti has since gone on to examine voting systems for other states. His conclusion: “Some systems are better than others, but none is nearly good enough.” In fact, a decade’s worth of Florida vote counting has been tripped up by technology of all makes and models, despite a state certification process designed to guard against such problems. Nationally, studies of the secret code underpinning election software have uncovered an array of troubles.

New York: Machine Casts Phantom Votes in the Bronx, Invalidating Real Ones: Report | WNYC

Tests on an electronic voting machine that recorded shockingly high numbers of extra votes in the 2010 election show that overheating may have caused upwards of 30 percent of the votes in a South Bronx voting precinct to go uncounted. WNYC first reported on the issue in December 2011, when it was found that tens of thousands of votes in the 2010 elections went uncounted because electronic voting machines counted more than one vote in a race.

North Carolina: Voters Report Frustrating Issues At Some North Carolina Polling Sites | digtriad.com

North Carolina voters went to the polls in large numbers to vote for Amendment One on Tuesday but the primary elections were not without issues. Over the course of the day, voters called and emailed the News 2 Information Center about problems they experienced at the polls. Some voters tell us there were party and ballot mixups at some voting locations. In Forsyth County, for example, our news crews visited the Sedge Garden Recreational Center where a voter told us she asked for a Republican Ballot but was forced to vote unaffiliated. “They told me to go to the computer because I wasn’t registered as a Republican, I was registered as Unaffiliated. So, I said, ‘well, can I have a ballot?’ and they said no you need to go to the computer.'”

West Virginia: Voting machine problems cause election night confusion in Brooke County West Virginia | wtov9.com

Elections officials in Brooke County were counting ballots well into Wednesday morning because of problems with two voting machines. Brooke County Clerk Sylvia Benzo said she lost track of time as poll workers tried to sort through election night confusion. Benzo said there was a problem in one of the Follansbee precincts early on that elections officials knew they would have to remedy. But there was another issue with a voting machine at a Weirton precinct. “I didn’t know about the one with the problem in Weirton until later in the evening, and that one ironed out and we were able to upload that information into our system and that one was OK. But this last machine that had a total of 12 votes left on it, we couldn’t get those off of there,” Benzo said.

Wisconsin: Voting machine concerns bubble up as Wisconsin recall elections near | Statehouse News

You might be forgiven for thinking John Washburn is paranoid. Plenty of people do, Washburn admits with some humor. … “Quite frankly, I’m not really concerned by (being called paranoid), because it’s highly correlated with how much people have checked my claims,” he said. Washburn’s fears — that Wisconsinites and, really, voters nationwide, are putting too much faith in a questionable voting system — may be unfounded. But he’s not the only one worried. As part of a University of California-Santa Barbara study in 2007 that reviewed electronic voting machines similar to some used in Wisconsin, researchers designed software they said “developed a virus-like software that can spread across the voting system, modifying the firmware of the voting machines. The modified firmware is able to steal votes even in the presence of a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail.”

Pakistan: Pakistan seeks to emulate India’s electronic voting system | Dawn.com

Impressed by India’s successful use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) in its elections, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) is seeking to emulate the system in the upcoming general elections. The third meeting of the poll management bodies of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was held at the Indian capital, where “India showcased its use of modern technology for strengthening democracy and election management systems,” a report in Indian daily The Hindu said. Following a presentation on the use of technology in polls, an ECP member admitted an interest in the Indian mechanism.

Switzerland: New study critical of e-voting systems being tested in Switzerland | swissinfo

Swiss e-voting systems lack transparency and are vulnerable to attack by malevolent software, a study has found. The authorities are looking for solutions but officials point out that there is no such thing as absolute security, even with the traditional ballot paper vote. With the systems used so far in electronic voting trials “citizens cannot verify if their vote has been registered and counted correctly. They are obliged to trust the administration and authorities completely,” Eric Dubuis, information technology professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, told swissinfo.ch. Under the mandate of the Federal Chancellery, Dubuis co-authored a study on verifiable e-voting systems – systems that allow the voter to trace all the steps of his or her vote and to check that there has been no manipulation and that the vote has been duly counted.

Canada: Elections Canada may roll out Internet voting in 2015 in spite of security concerns | CottageCountryNow

While Huntsville council tackles election topics such as ward boundaries, some residents believe the issue of electronic voting should be the primary concern. Grant Hallman, a retired resident who spent a career in software development, has said council’s decision to discuss in 2013 whether electronic voting or traditional paper ballots will be used in the 2014 municipal election will not give the municipality enough time for thorough debate. Hallman said it will likely not give the municipality enough time to switch back to paper ballots if council decides it does not want to use the telephone and Internet voting method used in the previous municipal election. There are several concerns Hallman and others have with the electronic voting method.

United Kingdom: Scottish council election: Will your vote count? | BBC News

All you have to do is vote. A sophisticated electronic system will take care of the rest. Where have we heard that before? In 2007 the message was the same: a complex voting system would be tamed by technology. Electronic counting – e-counting – would deliver election results which were secure, fast and accurate. Instead we got fiasco. Some counting machines initially refused to do their job. Thousands of voters found the ballot papers confusing. In some places the design of the papers was changed at the last minute. About 140,000 ballots were rejected as supposedly spoiled or blank. To cap it all, BBC Scotland then revealed that the overwhelming majority of those rejected votes had been ruled void automatically by the machines: no human had ever been involved in the process. And yet the 2007 burach was born from the best of intentions.

National: Why Online Voting Isn’t So Safe – FBI investigating student who hacked college election | Mobiledia

A California student tried to win a college government election by hacking into classmates’ accounts, which may lead to federal charges and increased privacy for not only colleges, but national and state elections as well. Matt Weaver, a junior, ran for student government president at California State San Marcos, located near San Diego, when school officials said he hacked into a computer and stole 700 voters’ passwords and identifications to alter the polling results. School police detained and released Weaver, but have yet charge him for the accusations, which include unlawful access to a computer, election fraud and identity theft. The FBI, which usually isn’t interested in the college student government results, is investigating Weaver’s hacking skills. School officials said they caught Weaver working on a school computer, and in possession of a device, used to steal passwords. … Federal authorities are also examining Weaver’s activities to decide if such hacking may interfere with state or national elections.

Russia: Elections Chief Vladimir Churov Admits Astrakhan Violations | The Moscow Times

Elections chief Vladimir Churov raised opposition hopes of overturning Astrakhan’s mayoral election by announcing widespread procedural violations, a claim made by candidate Oleg Shein and his supporters. Video footage revealed procedural violations at 128 of the city’s 202 polling stations during the March 4 vote, although there was no evidence of falsification, Churov told journalists Friday. The announcement was greeted with jubilation by Shein, whose refusal to concede the election to the ruling party candidate and a dramatic hunger strike have turned him into an opposition hero. “Our chances of success in court have been significantly improved,” he wrote on his blog. “Now I’m confident that the court will annul the election in Astrakhan.” Shein says he defeated United Russia’s Mikhail Stolyarov in districts with electronic counting machines as well as in exit polls, sparking allegations that the vote was rigged. Officially, Shein lost the election to Stolyarov by more than 30 percentage points.

Utah: Candidate Threatens Lawsuit Over Use of Electronic Voting at Utah GOP Convention | KCPW

The State Republican Party could have a lawsuit on their hands. Brian Jenkins, who is running against U.S. Congressman Jason Chaffetz, says he is upset about the possibility of electronic voting being used at the upcoming Republican state convention. Jenkins says the electronic method can be manipulated and he’s worried about the inability to check the votes after they are cast. “I actually think that if we can verify, there won’t be any skullduggery,there won’t be any kind of cheating if there is true verification,” Jenkins says. ” But if there is not verification the temptation to alter the outcome is almost irresistible.”