New Jersey: South Jersey voting-machine incident makes waves | Philadelphia Inquirer

When the returns came in for the Cumberland County Democratic Committee last summer, Cynthia Zirkle couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Only 86 votes were cast in the race to represent her district in Fairfield Township, and despite assurances from dozens of friends, Zirkle and her husband, Ernest, had managed to win just 19 votes between them. “I can’t believe that’s correct,” Zirkle told her husband, a retired veterinarian and the town’s deputy mayor.

The couple sued the Cumberland County Board of Elections and discovered that due to a programming error, their results had been switched with those of their opponents. In a rare turn of events, a new election was ordered, which the Zirkles handily won.

The case caught the eye of a Rutgers law professor who has spent years arguing that the touch-screen voting machines in use across New Jersey are prone to malfunction and hacking and need a paper backup that would allow for manual recounts. Provided with that real-life example of the machines’ fallibility, Penny Venetis, codirector of the constitutional litigation clinic at Rutgers-Newark Law School, is fighting to get the state Appellate Court to reopen her 2004 lawsuit and rewrite the rules on how elections are conducted in New Jersey. “The issues involved extend way beyond Cumberland County,” Venetis said. “It’s only because it was such a small election we know about this. If it was Newark, forget it. But that’s our point, stuff like this happens. Computers can be told to do whatever you want. They can play Jeopardy!; they can cheat in elections.”

Voting Blogs: Meet our election experts: Douglas Jones | fyi

Computer technology has enabled humanity to make great advances in aircraft design, communications, and countless other fields. But when it comes to recording the results of elections, it’s often unclear to election officials in towns across the country whether the introduction of computers has been a help or a hindrance.

That’s where Douglas W. Jones, associate professor of computer science in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, comes in. In 2010, he was appointed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) as one of four new technical and scientific experts to its Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC). The TGDC is charged under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) with assisting the EAC in developing federal voluntary voting system guidelines that are used to test and certify voting systems.

Previously, Jones served on the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems for 10 years, where he helped examine and approve voting systems before they were sold to the state’s county governments. He testified at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings in Tallahassee, Fla., on Jan. 11, 2001, and was involved in reviewing the federal 2002 Voting System Standards.

Bangladesh: Shamim, Ivy back Electronic Voting Machines Taimur opposes | bdnews24.com

BNP-backed Taimur Alam Khandaker has altogether opposed use of Electronic Voting Machines in the Narayanganj City Corporation, Selina Hayat Ivy preferred it in three instead of nine centres while Shamim Osman went the whole hog for it. Ivy said she will make relatively fewer promises as she is against tall talks after Shamim Osman rattled off his successes when he was the Narayanganj-1 MP.

The war of words between Ivy and Shamim began in earnest in the televised debate, with Ivy firing the first salvo at her ‘elder brother’, saying he puts the party behind everything else. The people are behind me, the former Narayanganj municipality said during the primetime Election Commission debate. Shamim, on his part, said it is difficult to work without party support. “BNP did it first. We did it in response.”

Kenya: Use electronic voting, urges US envoy | The Nation

The 2012 General Election should be conducted electronically if the voting is to be free, fair and transparent, US Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration has said. The envoy faulted manual voting that the country has been using, stating that it was prone to malpractices and suggested that it be discarded.

On Tuesday, Mr Gration advocated for the electronic voter registration arguing that it was the only way to improve the confidence of Kenyans in elections. “Let the government put in place electronic system of voting ahead of the General Election in the country for transparent results to be seen in the electoral process,” the ambassador said.

Philippines: House biometric voting system pushed | Tempo

An administration congressman wants House Speaker Feliciano “Sonny” R. Belmonte Jr. to revive the Biometric Electronic Voting System (BEVS) project that two of his predecessors failed to install due to a glitch in the installed system. Negros Occidental Rep. Alfredo Benitez filed House Resolution No. 1783 seeking a review of the status of the P15-million electronic plenary voting system that was initiated by then House Speaker Jose C. de Venecia Jr. in late 2007.

However, De Venecia’s predecessor, House Speaker Prospero C. Nograles, decided to abandon the project when testing of the computerized voting showed grave errors.

Maldives: Electronic voting depends on public awareness | Minivan News

The Maldives has expressed support for electronic voting systems in India and Pakistan, and is taking steps to introduce Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) to its own electoral process. At an informal meeting of Electoral Commissioners from SAARC member countries in India, the Maldives joined Bhutan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka in praising India’s use of EVMs and indicated that “legal amendments would be thought of to see that EVMs were made popular to ensure free and fair polls in their countries,” Indian news outlet The Hindu reported yesterday.

Commissioners met to discuss Afghanistan’s voting procedures in light of waning financial and other aid from NATO allies. Maldives Elections Commission President Fuad Thaufeeq said the commission, which is developing a proposal for Parliament regarding EVMs, has met with the Committee on Independent Commissions to discuss their implementation.

Switzerland: Expats pleased with e-voting, disappointed no candidates elected | swissinfo

The parliamentary elections on Sunday were both a success and failure for the large community of Swiss voters living abroad. On the one hand, electronic voting worked in the four cantons that introduced the system for expatriate voters. However, none of the Swiss abroad who stood for election were voted in.

“We are both delighted and grateful to the cantons for carrying out these tests and to the government for allowing them,” Rudolf Wyder, director of the Organisation of the Swiss Abroad (OSA), told swissinfo.ch. It was the first time that electronic voting was possible.

More than 3,500 expatriates registered to vote were able to benefit from e-voting in cantons Basel City, St Gallen, Graubünden and Aargau. That amounts to 53.1 per cent of the Swiss abroad who cast ballots in these cantons, the Federal Chancellery said on Monday.

Russia: Electronically verified elections | Russia & India Report

In 1994, when the Russian budget was more or less equivalent to that of New York City, the state decided to begin development of the Automated State Election System (SAS). Prior to the development of SAS, Russian electoral rolls were printed on typewriters and ballot papers were hand-counted. In the 1993 elections, it took election officials 12 days to count the votes. SAS, which took about a year to develop and launch, was built on a foundation of Soviet technological innovations, but some of the world’s leading IT companies, including HP, Oracle, and Cisco Systems, also contributed.

“With the creation of the Elections SAS, we became pioneers. And to this day, not a single country in the world has a system like ours,” said Mikhail Popov, head of the Federal Center of Information Technologies under the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation, in a 2009 interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta. It’s possible that he is over-praising his creation. But the SAS has served more than 20,000 election campaigns at various levels without significant technological failures.

India: Opposition alleges irregularities in Tamil Nadu civic polls | The Hindu

The first phase of the civic polls for over 1.35 lakh local bodies in Tamil Nadu was on Monday marred by allegations of irregularities by opposition parties, including the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, against the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam as 28 per cent voters cast their votes by 11 a.m.

Besides complaints of names missing in voters’ list and glitches in Electronic Voting Machines, allegations of non-compliance of High Court order on video recording of the polling, lack of enough security and bogus voting were levelled by the DMK and other parties such as the Pattali Makkal Katchi.

Mississippi: Voting machines under scrutiny | The Clarion-Ledger

Since Mississippi required electronic voting machines in 2006 to meet a federal mandate, all the state’s precincts have used approved equipment. For most of Mississippi’s 82 counties that meant the touch-screen machines the secretary of state’s office got at a bulk discount to comply with the Help America Vote Act. Counties wanting federal money to buy electronic machines had no options.

Now the financial costs assessed with operating touch-screen machines and concerns over contested elections have led officials in one county to ditch those machines and those in another to consider doing the same – both in favor of electronic paper ballot scanning machines . Even before the state mandate, Rankin County had opted for touch-screen machines. It has used them since the November 2003 general election. But District 5 Supervisor Jay Bishop said the system should be re-examined.

Supervisors last month cut the annual maintenance contract for the county’s touch-screen machines from roughly $57,000 to $47,000. But Bishop says, “If we were to go and put (paper ballot) scanners in, that would knock costs down to around $10,000 a year.

Oman: Encouraging response to first phase of elections to Oman’s Majlis Shura | gulfnews

The first phase of elections to Oman’s Majlis Shura began on Saturday with encouraging response from citizens living in GCC countries, especially at the embassy in Abu Dhabi where a large number of citizens queued up since early morning to exercise their franchise. Oman’s ambassador to the UAE, Shaikh Mohammad Bin Abdullah Al Qatabi, along with the staff at the mission, also cast their votes.

Shaikh Mohammad told official Oman News Agency that the overwhelming response reflected the awareness among Omani citizens about the importance of the role assigned to the Shura in the Sultanate. In Dubai, a large number of Omani students, most studying in the northern emirates, turned up at the Consulate to cast their votes.

In Doha, Mohammad Bin Nasser Al Wahaibi, ambassador to Qatar, said that 1,000 citizens had already voted and more were likely to cast theirs vote by evening 6pm.

Voting Blogs: Shocked, shocked to find “non-cyber” attacks on voting systems | Educated Guesswork

Argonne Labs’s demonstration attack on a Diebold voting machine is getting a lot of press. The article above has the details, but briefly, what the Argonne team did was to insert some malicious “alien” electronics between the CPU and the touch screen. Unsurprisingly, that device can modify input from the touch screen and/or output to the touch screen, allowing the attacker to tamper with the election. To read the press coverage and the quotes given by the authors, you might get the impression that this was something new. For instance:

 

“This is a fundamentally very powerful attack and we believe that voting officials should become aware of this and stop focusing strictly on cyber [attacks],” says Vulnerability Assessment Team member John Warner. “There’s a very large physical protection component of the voting machine that needs to be addressed.”

These comments aside, there’s not really any new information here; rather, it was completely obvious that this sort of thing was possible to anyone who knew how the devices were constructed. It’s well-known that the only defenses against this were physical security of the machines itself (tamper seals, locks, custody, etc.) and that they were extremely weak. Indeed, Alex Halderman and his team demonstrated some not-dissimilar attacks a while back on the Indian Electronic Voting Machines. The EVEREST report described a man-in-the-middle attack on the iVotronic interface to the VVPAT vote printer. Indeed, the same team from Argonne demonstrated a similar attack on a Sequoia system im 2009.

There are a number of reasons why voting researchers have historically focused on informational attacks (as I’ve saidbefore, “cyber” isn’t the word that computer scientists would typically use). First, they’re easier to do wholesale. While it’s moderately expensive—though not that expensive—to reverse engineer the software and develop an exploit and/or replacement software, once you’ve done that you can make as many copies as you want. Moreover, if you have a good exploit (like many of the ones described in the TTBR), you may be able to easily install it with very brief physical access, without opening the case, and perhaps without even violating any security seals. For obvious reasons, attacks which can be mounted by voters seem a lot more interesting than attacks which involve semi long-term access to the machine. It’s not exactly likely that your average voter is going to be allowed to open the machine in the middle of the election.

Moreover, in some cases, informational attacks (i.e., viruses) have been demonstrated that only require contact with a small number of voting machines. The idea here is that you have temporary access to a given machine, infect it with the virus, and then this somehow spreads to every machine in the county. By contrast, a physical attack like this requires tampering with every voting machine.

Switzerland: OSCE monitors to observe Swiss elections | swissinfo

Experts from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) are coming to Switzerland to monitor this month’s federal elections.
Their two main focuses of attention will be electronic voting for voters living abroad, and campaign financing, according to a joint statement issued on Friday by the federal chancellery and the foreign ministry.

The experts are hoping to learn from the Swiss e-voting experience so as to be able to apply the lessons in younger democracies and to help develop new election technologies. However, the OSCE monitors determine their programme themselves and will only give the Swiss authorities operational details at short notice.

Bangladesh: BNP fears unfounded, Election Commission to move ahead with Electronic Voting Machines | Financial Express

The Election Commission (EC) is moving ahead with its plan to introduce the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) in the upcoming elections, including the Narayanganj City Corporation (NCC) polls, despite the opposition BNP’s objection. “We’re moving ahead with the EVM project,” Election Commissioner Brig Gen (Retd) M Sakhawat Hossain told journalists at the EC Secretariat office in the city Wednesday, reports UNB.

About BNP’s opposition to the EVM system that it’s a weapon to manipulate vote, he said there is no similarity with the system that was recently shown by them (BNP). “The EVM system we’re applying and going to apply is not used in Germany and the United States. And it won’t have any connection with the central server,” he added.

Mississippi: County seeking DOJ approval to remove voting machine printers | Leader Call

Jones County Circuit Clerk Bart Gavin is waiting for a decision from the U.S. Department of Justice about the legality of removing printers from the county’s voting machines. Gavin gained the approval of the Jones County Board of Supervisors in August, but at the suggestion of District 5 Supervisor Jerome Wyatt, Gavin has to provide information stating that no laws will be violated if the printers are removed.

“Our voting machines were not designed to have these printers,” said Gavin. “The Mississippi Legislature decided we should add the printers after we switched to electronic voting machines.” The printers are extra attachments that were added to the voting machines at the request of then-Secretary of State Eric Clark. Gavin said he understands the desire to have a back-up record of votes cast, but the printers are not needed for back-up.

Texas: U.S. Supreme Court Rules Dallas County’s Appeal in Fight Over Voting Machines is “Moot” | Dallas News

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a very confusing ruling in the case involving Dallas County’s voting machines — a case, you’ll recall, that stemmed from Linda Harper-Brown’s 19-vote victory over Democrat Bob Romano in 1998. Long story short: The Texas Democratic Party (represented in part by attorney Clay Jenkins, now the county judge) sued Dallas County in federal court, claiming, as Ballot Access News neatly summed it up back in June, that “some voters are tricked into thinking they voted a straight-ticket vote, when actually they hadn’t.”

There was also an issue with whether the county pre-cleared the so-called direct-recording electronic voting machines with the Department of Justice before putting them into place. The county insisted they had — twice, most recently in March 2010, when the DOJ said Dallas was good to go.

Texas: Medina County TX delays shift to paperless balloting | San Antonio Express-News

Medina County residents opposed to a planned shift there to electronic-only voting are cheering a decision by county commissioners to keep paper ballots available in the Nov. 8 election.

But Natalia Mayor Ruby Vera called the commissioners’ vote last week to delay until March the conversion to paperless voting “a stalling tactic” to appease roughly 700 petition signers who assert that using paper ballots is “a right” of voters.

Commissioners had voted in September switch to all-electronic voting in November, but Medina County Judge Jim Barden said there’s not enough time to educate the public and to complete the transition.

Texas: Court throws out judgment against voting machines | Associated Press

The Supreme Court has thrown out a ruling that could have halted the use of a certain electronic voting machine in Texas. The high court without comment vacated a ruling against Dallas County, Texas. That county was sued by the Texas Democratic Party over the use of iVotronic machines.

Read the Court Orders (PDF)

They allow people to vote straight-party tickets, but if the voter subsequently touches any of the candidates in that party on the screen, their vote for that person is rescinded.

Voting Blogs: Pennsylvania County Begins Exam of Failed ES&S Touch-Screen Systems; Will Vote on Paper Instead in November | The Brad Blog

“What is a vote worth?” Venango County, PA Election Board Chairman Craig Adams asked last week. “If the vote is counted it is priceless. If it is not counted, I don’t care what it costs. Let’s get a right.”

“After months of legal wrangling,” Marybeth Kuznik of the non-partisan Election Integrity advocacy group VotePA told The BRAD BLOG last week, Venango County’s landmark independent forensic examination of the notoriously unreliable and 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, most often touch-screen) e-voting system finally got under way. Kuznik explained that the study comes in the wake of the county having experienced “numerous reports of vote-flipping, candidates missing from screens, write-ins missing, and high undervote rates in their May 17 Primary.”

National: Researchers hack e-voting system for US presidential elections | Macworld UK

Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory this week showed how an electronic voting machine model that’s expected to be widely used to tally votes in the US 2012 elections can be easily hacked using inexpensive, widely-available electronic components.

Roger Johnston, head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at the US Department of Energy’s science and engineering reseaech lab, said the hack, which requires about $25 and very little technical expertise, would let cybercriminals “flip” votes gathered on Diebold Accuvote TS machines and change election results without raising any suspicion.

Johnston and his team have long warned about vulnerabilities in e-voting machines. And two years ago, the team demonstrated how a Sequoia touch screen e-voting machine could be similarly manipulated using cheap components. The latest research was first reported by the Salon news site.

Pennsylvania: Venango County: Electronic Voting Under Scrutiny | WICU12

Two Pittsburgh College professors today began an examination of reported electronic voting machine problems in Venango County. And while the forensic audit takes place, voters will use paper ballots in the November general election.

After the May primary, the county received complaints from voters who said the touch screen machines did not register their votes correctly, basically flipping the votes to another candidate. Other problems included reports of missing write in votes.

West Virginia: County to refuse maintenance contract for voting machines | The Charleston Gazette

Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper said he will refuse to sign a maintenance contract for the county’s electronic voting machines. Earlier this month, Carper and county commissioners Hoppy Shores and Dave Hardy reluctantly agreed to pay a contract to Election Systems & Software to provide maintenance for the county’s electronic voting machines. The maintenance contract would have cost the county $56,000 a year for four years.

In 2005, under former secretary of state Betty Ireland, state officials negotiated a sole-source contract with ES&S to provide touch-screen and optical-scan voting machines all over the state. State officials told county election officials earlier this year they would be passing on responsibility for maintaining the voting machines to county government.

The state contract gave ES&S a virtual monopoly on voting machines in West Virginia and a monopoly on fixing the machines if they break. In the past, Kanawha County officials have had trouble getting in touch with ES&S representatives and finding qualified technicians to work on the machines.

Canada: Returning officer advises against electronic vote counting for Calgary | Calgary Herald

If Calgary’s returning officer gets her way, the next election night will still be all about the hands — the poll staff manually counting ballots, and the candidates chewing their nails as they await the slow trickle of results. Barb Clifford will recommend Monday that council avoid joining other large Canadian cities that electronically count votes, because she worries it’s a prohibitive expense.

“It’s pretty hard to justify $3.4 million for something that will be used one night every three or maybe four years,” she said Wednesday, after a report on vote-counting machines was released.

New Jersey: Zirkles win Fairfield election; state can’t confirm investigation | NJ.com

The county and the courts had already expressed it but the voters of Fairfield Township made it official — again. Democratic County Committee candidates Cindy and Ernie Zirkle were elected Tuesday over competitors Mark and Vivian Henry, according to unofficial online results from the county Board of Elections.

Mail-in ballots had not been recorded by 10:30 p.m. but the Zirkles took 33 percent of the vote over the Henrys’ 17 percent. “We don’t trust the system,” said Cindy Zirkle, so a substantial number of absentee ballots were distributed.

“It’s a shame,” Zirkle began late Tuesday night, that certain opposition parties “refused to accept the Board of Elections’ admission.” That admission being Board Director Lizbeth Hernandez stating she inadvertently mismatched the names on the ballots and the results declared in June were the exact opposite.

National: Argonne researchers ‘hack’ Diebold e-voting system | Computerworld

Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory this week showed how an electronic voting machine model that’s expected to be widely used to tally votes in the 2012 elections can be easily hacked using inexpensive, widely-available electronic components.

Roger Johnston, head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s science and engineering reseaech lab, said the hack, which requires about $25 and very little technical expertise, would let cybercriminals “flip” votes gathered on Diebold Accuvote TS machines and change election results without raising any suspicion.

Johnston and his team have long warned about vulnerabilities in e-voting machines. And two years ago, the team demonstrated how a Sequoia touch screen e-voting machine could be similarly manipulated using cheap components. The latest research was first reported by the Salon news site.

National: Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control | Salon.com

It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.

Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”

Editorials: Independent vote audit needed in South Carolina | The Post and Courier

During the last legislative session, a Senate judiciary subcommittee heard testimony from the State Election Commission and its critics about problems in the 2010 elections. The committee suggested that the two sides work together to recommend improvements to the process.

So far that hasn’t happened. Critics of the system, including the League of Women Voters, contend that the state’s electronic voting system is inherently flawed. The State Election Commission says the system is functional and that problems experienced in the last general election can be fixed.

Given the continuing disagreement over the electronic voting system, which is used throughout the state, an independent look at the situation is in order. The Legislative Audit Council ought to be given the task. A column on our Commentary page from former Clemson computer science professor Eleanor Hare cites problems with verifying data from the 2010 election.

South Carolina: Votes were miscounted, laws ignored | The Post and Courier

Thousands of votes in the 2010 general election were counted incorrectly in South Carolina. Not only were these votes counted incorrectly, the State Election Commission (SEC) is ignoring state law that requires a recount and federal law that requires that the entirety of the data files from an election be retained for 22 months.

These reasonable obligations were not followed despite concerns raised by the League of Women Voters of South Carolina (LWVSC) about potential problems with our voting machines. The League has not detected any corrections that would have overturned election results, but the audit of the results is not complete.

Given the large number of votes incorrectly recorded and the pervasiveness of errors, it is entirely possible that some close elections have been decided incorrectly in the past.

Kenya: Electronic voting ‘is still six years away for Kenya’ | Business Daily

Election officials predict it could take six years before Kenya adopts an electronic voting system critical in forestalling a recurrence of the chaotic 2007 elections. This emerged as the Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC) started the process of identifying the appropriate technology for its use through a two-day exhibition that ended last Friday.

Mr James Oswago, the IIEC chief executive officer, said the country would not yet implement electronic voting but would instead procure a platform for electronic voter registration for next year’s elections in which voters will cast ballots for at least six candidates in various levels of government.

“We are not yet ready for electronic voting in 2012 mainly because there is a lot of civic education to be done to the public and politicians,” said Mr Oswago. “Any application of technology must increase administrative efficiency, reduce long-term costs and enhance political transparency. In the end, elections are about choices expressed in terms of results and those results acquire legitimacy only through unanimous or widespread acceptance”.