Details Revealed for CA's New, Unprecedented 'Top-to-Bottom Review', Hack Testing of E-Vote Systems

Source: BRAD BLOG

CA Sec. of State Releases Final Details on Unprecedented 'Top to Bottom Review' and Hack Testing of all Electronic Voting Systems in the State
Debra Bowen Names Teams and Methods to be Used for New Certification, Decertification Process...

CA Sec. of State Debra Bowen's just released statement on her promised, unprecedented, first-of-its-kind in the nation, "top to bottom review" of all of California's electronic voting systems is posted below.

The review will include "red team" hack testing for the first time ever. Done as standard operating procedure for similar security-sensitive, mission-critical commercial systems, this sort of penetration testing has never been performed on America's voting systems. Until now.

There are links within her statement below where you can find more details. For example, the State's review teams will include folks such as computer security expert "hacking" Harri Hursti, and blind technology expert Noel Runyan, who has been highly critical of unverifiable touch-screen DRE voting systems...

FULL REPORT, BOWEN STATEMENT:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4530

Read more: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4530

Next 2600 convention, drop a copy of that software, or a machine, right into the middle of it and let them have at it.

I daresay it won't last a half hour.

I know what 2600 is. But I'm guessing others here may not. I'll leave it to the curious to go figure out :-)

In the meantime, you can likely better your bottom dollar that those folks are already paying strict attention to all of this.

Don't DO THIS to me!!!!

:kick::kick::kick:

along with so many others. I didn't know they had 2600 conventions. Oh, you were talking about phreaking, sorry.........I guess they've come a long way from the 2600.

zalinda

...One that is actually COUNTED. Unlike "paper trails" on touch-screen DRE systems which are *never* counted!

Here's a graphic that helps explain from http://www.votersunite.org/info/amendHR811orNot.asp

provided both methods were linked.

ie:
you use a touchscreen to vote
after you verify it's correct it prints out a machine/human readable ballot
the individual vote tallies as well as total vote tally is incrementedy appropriately.
you drop your verification ballot in a slot that counts how many ballots have been dropped in.

At the end of the day if the total paper ballots counted and total electronic ballots counted don't match a recount of the paper ballots is triggered... if there are still problems they can be hand counted.

Could somebody mess with the software that counts the ballots so that the total counted is right but how they're counted is wrong?
Of course.
Somebody could do the same with the firmware that runs the optical scanner... or somebody doing a hand count could intentionally count a vote in a way other than it was cast.
Nothing is foolproof.

Electronic voting isn't any less foolproof than any other method.
It just depends on how it's done.

There is no chain of custody possible, there is no way to prove with any certainity that bits were not flipped by some malicious or accidental routine, and most importantly, if you foolishly compare this to an electronic banking sort of problem, no way to reconstruct a secret ballot from other transaction records. You can't prove the vote hasn't been flipped either maliciously or by some subtle bug in the software.

Claims that "Electronic voting isn't any less foolproof than any other method" are simply false. Ballots recorded as invisible electronic bits can never be as trustworthy as paper ballots, no matter how it is done.

Nothing is "foolproof" but invisible electronic bits, even those associated with a "toilet paper roll" printouts, are much easier to tamper with than traditional hand marked paper ballots.

To claim otherwise is to obscure the issue.

The matching number of electronic ballots and "paper trails" has little do with whether the voters intent has been recording accurately.

Sure, someone can mess with optical scan systems as well. But at least you've got what you KNOW to be the voters intent to go and check, and that paper ballot has actually been tabulated, unlike with DRE touch-screen systems.

With a DRE, it is physically impossible for any human being to verify their vote before it is cast and counted by the touch-screen system. And there is no way to know that the ensuing "paper trail" has actually been verified by the voter.

Only paper ballots offer evidence of the voters intent. Period.

My computer whiz neighbor worked for him at UC Davis and relayed to me all his suspicions and skepticisms of electronic voting security before it ever splashed in the news. Bishop is ahead of the curve on this, and is definitely going to give it the proper shakeout it deserves.

Oh, kudos to Debra Bowen for kicking this off!

this is why we voted for her!

to 10:00. He kept stating that his bill would require a "voter verified paper BALLOT with an audit on every FEDERAL election"; he also kept stating that we need to be using optical scan machines; he kept stressing those words! Is this not what we have been working to gain? He did note that the State's elections would not come under this bill, only the federal ones; he also said that this would be in place for the 2008 presidential election.

I do realize that we MUST have OPEN SOURCE CODE on optical scan machines as well as the hated DREs and counting of those ballots in PUBLIC! I think, however, that this a giant step forward, no? I know this is the hangup but it is a hell of lot better than what we have had in the past. We just must keep working for open source code on any and all machines!

His claim that his bill provides a "voter verified paper BALLOT" is incredibly misleading. He KNOWS that according to his bill, usually 97% of ALL such paper TRAILS (they are not ballots on DRE touch-screen systems) will NEVER be counted by anyone or anything.



That's neither what he said to me, personally, nor what his bill requires. He easily could have amended his bill to REQUIRE either optical scan machines or hand counts, and thus, we really would have a paper BALLOT for every vote cast.

He didn't.



No. It's not. And it's arguably worse in many ways because we are giving a false sense of security to voters using "paper trails" on DREs that those trails will actually be counted.

Worse, with a hard fought for "paper trail" now in place, contesting questionable elections will become even more impossible.

Eg. Sarasota's FL-13 had 18,000 votes disappear on their paperless touch-screen systems. Add a paper trail, and you'd have the same 18,000 undervotes (voters failed to change or notice the prob when it was on the screen in front of their face, why would they have any better luck noticing or changing it on a tiny piece of paper afterwards?). The only difference is that the bad guys could then say: "Hey, those 'voter verified paper trails' you wanted prove that those 18,000 voters chose to not vote! Case dismissed!"

For more on that, and how People for the American Way (PFAW) is deceptively selling the "Sarasota" deception concerning the Holt bill and actually advocating in favor of the use of touch-screen systems, see here:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4526

taking the machines/software out of the political arena and putting them into the hands of people who like to break software is a good start.

Our Sec. of State is going to turn the mess over to the adult script kiddies and see how fast they can break the system. Any bets out there on how fast?