Democracy on Faith

Last week the Washington, D.C., Board of Elections and Ethics decided it had better do a test run of its new internet voting machines designed to debut in time for November's elections. In 24 hours they had their "winners": Their new U.S representative went by the code name "Colossus" and the new chairman of the city council was a rogue computer in the mode of HAL 9000 from Arthur Clarke's 2001, Space Odyssey.

That anyone would seriously think that voting over the internet is a good idea is startling for its sheer naivete. That election officials in thirty-three states plan to do just that this November should be prima facie evidence that our democracy is headed for the dust-bin. As CTvoterscount.org exclaimed in frustration the current attitude seems to be "Damn the science, Damn the integrity; If it feels good do it!"

Fortunately the Washington test run was designed to be the canary in the mine shaft. As Time Magazine reports:"To gauge its security and iron out the kinks, officials invited hackers to take a whack at breaching the system's defenses. That task turned out to be far too easy. Within three hours, Halderman and two graduate students located a flaw in the system's "brittle" security design. After waiting a day for votes to stream in, the trio hijacked the server — changing ballots, broadcasting the maize and blue's fight song, seizing control of the security cameras in the board's offices and unearthing a folder containing the personal information of the more than 900 overseas voters who were to receive online ballots next month. It took 36 hours for officials to notice they had indeed been hacked."

We already know from experience that absentee ballots are easily tampered with. That the issue seemed less than pressing was due to the fact that the numbers were relatively small. With internet voting the ballot access for a potential tamperer is increased exponentially. As any computer geek would tell you: the basic problem is “shell-injection vulnerability,” having to do with the ballot upload procedure. When the voter submits his or her ballot as a ".pdf," file, the server saves it as a temporary file and encrypts it using a command-line tool. Now although the server replaces the filename automatically it keeps whatever file extension the voter provided. Instead of a file ending in “.pdf,” the hacker could upload a file with a name that ended in almost any string and make it part of the command the server executed. In effect, allowed him to remotely log in as a privileged user.

Such problems need to be addressed in ALL electronic voting machines



but with email voting, unlike with say New York's spiffy new optical scanners, in the case of tampering there would be no verifiable paper trail of record. Expecting the public to have faith in the outcome-- evident hacking or not-- feels like second rate science fiction ... or a comedy spoof...