America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets
America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy
Targets
By BRIAN BARRETT 08.02.16. 9:57 AM
THIS WEEK, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump openly
speculated that this election would be “rigged.” Last month, Russia decided to
take an active role in our election. There’s no basis for questioning the
results of a vote that’s still months away. But the interference and aspersions
do merit a fresh look at the woeful state of our outdated, insecure electronic
voting machines.
We’ve previously discussed the sad state of electronic
voting machines in America, but it’s worth a closer look as we approach
election day itself, and within the context of increased cyber-hostilities
between the US and Russia. Besides, by now states have had plenty of warning
since a damning report by the Brennan Center for Justice about our voting
machine vulnerabilities came out last September. Surely matters must have
improved since then.
Well, not exactly. In fact, not really at all.
Rise of the Machines
Most people remember the vote-counting debacle of the
2000 election, the dangling chads that resulted in the Supreme Court breaking a
Bush-Gore deadlock. What people may not remember is the resulting Help America
Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, which among other objectives worked to phase out
the use of the punchcard voting systems that had caused millions of ballots to
be tossed.
In many cases, those dated machines were replaced with
electronic voting systems. The intentions were pure. The consequences were a
technological train wreck.
“People weren’t thinking about voting system security or
all the additional challenges that come with electronic voting systems,” says
the Brennan Center’s Lawrence Norden. “Moving to electronic voting systems
solved a lot of problems, but created a lot of new ones.”
The list of those problems is what you’d expect from any
computer or, more specifically, any computer that’s a decade or older. Most of
these machines are running Windows XP, for which Microsoft hasn’t released a
security patch since April 2014. Though there’s no evidence of direct voting
machine interference to date, researchers have demonstrated that many of them
are susceptible to malware or, equally if not more alarming, a well-timed
denial of service attack.
“When people think that people think about doing
something major to impact our election results at the voting machine, they
think they’d try to switch results,” says Norden, referring to potential
software tampering. “But you can do a lot less than that and do a lot of damage…
If you have machines not working, or working slowly, that could create lots of
problems too, preventing people from voting at all.”
The extent of vulnerability isn’t just hypothetical; late
last summer, Virginia decertified thousands of insecure WinVote machines. As
one security researcher described it, “anyone within a half mile could have
modified every vote, undetected” without “any technical expertise.” The vendor
had gone out of business years prior.
The WinVote systems are an extreme case, but not an
isolated one. Other voting machine models have potentially vulnerable wireless
components; Virginia’s just the only one where a test proved how bad the
situation was.
The worst part about the current state of voting machines
is that they don’t even require outside interference to undo an election.
“They’re all computers. They run on tens of thousands of lines of code,” says
Norden. “It’s impossible to have a perfectly secure, perfectly reliable
computer.”
That’s true, but in fairness, most computers aren’t quite
this imperfect, either.
A Good Kind of Audit
So electronic voting machines aren’t ideal. The good news
is, it’s entirely possible to mitigate any potential harm they might cause,
either by malice or mistake.
First, it’s important to realize that electronic voting
machines aren’t as commonplace as one might assume. Three-quarters of the
country will vote on a paper ballot this fall, says Pamela Smith, president of
Verified Voting, a group that promotes best practices at the polls. Only five
states—Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and New Jersey—use “direct
recording electronic” (DRE) machines exclusively. But lots of other states use
electronic machines in some capacity. Verified Voting also has a handy map of
who votes using what equipment, which lets you drill down both to specific
counties and machine brands, so you can see what’s in use at your polling
station.
More than half of the states conduct post-election
auditing, by checking vote totals against paper records, to ensure that the
votes are accurate. Both Smith and Norden agree that this sort of auditing is
the single best way to guarantee confidence in election results, as does MIT
computer scientist Ronald Rivest, who has written extensively [PDF] on voting
machine issues.
The problem is that not every state does post-election
audits. And even some that require them by law, namely Pennsylvania and
Kentucky, don’t actually use voter-verifiable paper trails, meaning they have
no way to complete an audit. And progress toward more and better auditing is
slow; Maryland just put an auditable system in place this year, Smith says, and
will pilot it during the fall election. Over a dozen states still have no audit
procedure at all.
The problem with putting these auditing systems in place
is the same one keeping more reliable voting machines from the booths in the
first place: a lack of money and political will. There’s new voting equipment
out there that’s much more secure than the machines states purchased in bulk a
decade or more ago, but only a handful of states and municipalities—Rhode
Island, DC, and parts of Wisconsin among them—have upgraded in the past year.
“The money’s not there right now,” says Norden. “We
interviewed election officials who told us what they were hearing from their
state legislators and others who would be funding this type of equipment, and
they say come back to us after there’s some kind of crisis.”
Which, if they wait long enough, is exactly what they’re
going to get.
Rigging the Vote
For what it’s worth, electronic voting machines have been
this hackable in previous elections as well, and there’s no indication—even in
Virginia—that there’s ever been any interference.
This year feels different though, in no small measure
because of Russia’s alleged responsibility for the DNC hack. If Putin would go
so far as release those emails, would he pursue a direct assault on our
vulnerable voting machines as well?
The short answer? Nyet.
“Putin’s not very nice, but he’s not stupid,” says Ryan
Maness, a visiting fellow at Northeastern University who specializes in
international cyber conflict and Russian foreign policy. “If they were going to
mess with the voting machines and the vote-counting software, they wouldn’t
have done the DNC hack.”
Maness argues that the DNC hack and subsequent email
release has put a spotlight on Russia. The blowback from such direct
interference in a United States election would be too severe. Besides, Maness
says, Putin’s main objective was likely to embarrass Hillary Clinton, rather
than elevate Trump. And he’s certainly achieved that much already.
But even if Maness is wrong, the even better news is that
the three states that will likely decide the election—Florida, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania—have voting machines that are in relatively good shape. Florida
has an audit requirement in place, while Ohio not only conducts audits, Smith
says, it has an “automatic recount provision,” where close races trigger a
manual recount without requiring a candidate to request one. “Pennsylvania is
of the most concern” among those three, says Smith, “based on the fact they
have so many paperless DREs in use.” Even there, though, election officials
will actively deploy paper ballots in the event that those machines fail.
Still, unlikelihood that Russia would tamper with our
voting machines hasn’t lifted the sense of unease around the election. When
Donald Trump suggests the election might be “rigged,” he’s referring to a host
of potential disruptions, from the times and dates of scheduled debates to
whatever else he might bend to his narrative. In November, should he lose,
he’ll find the voting machines to be an easy target.
That suspicion is the real danger of electronic voting
systems, and especially of those that can’t be easily or effectively audited.
If you can’t guarantee that there was no tampering—which not every state can—it
might not matter if any actually took place. In the wrong hands, the doubt
itself is damaging enough.
Comments
Post a Comment