[Voterescue] Great story on Cal. Sec. of State Debra Bowen

[Vickie Karp]

Several of us VoteRescuers got to meet California Sec. of State Debra
Bowen at the Net Roots Nation Convention in Austin a couple of weeks
ago!  The Register » Security »

Original URL:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/30/debra_bowen_usenix_keynote/


Dr. Strangevote saves mankind with Luddite voting recipe
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By Dan Goodin in San JosePublished Wednesday 30th July 2008 22:03 GMT

Usenix When it comes to elections, California Secretary of State Debra
Bowen opts for blander, more traditional technologies, and that
preference is helping her sleep better at night.

Speaking Wednesday at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Jose,
California, the state's top elections official laid out a decidedly
low-tech approach for ensuring that each voter's ballot is recorded as
cast. It involves the use of ink pens to record votes on old-fashioned
paper. An optical scanner records the information, and to make sure votes
are counted correctly, ballots are randomly selected and compared with
what's been tallied.

Click here to find out more!

Not only is the method cheaper and less prone to polling-place glitches,
she said, it also brings a transparency and auditability to elections
that you can't get with today's electronic voting machines.

"Voting and counting paper ballots are things that all citizens can
understand and in the case of random hand tallies, something that all
citizens can observe and understand," she told about 400 attendees. "Hand
tallies mean never having to say 'I trust you' to hundreds of thousands
of lines of code no matter how cute and appealing they may be."

Bowen made her remarks during a 75-minute keynote titled "Dr. Strangevote
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Paper Ballot."

As someone who understands cryptography and mucks around with Firefox
extensions, Bowen is no stranger to computer technology. But last August,
after commissioning a top-to-bottom review of all voting machines used in
California, she imposed strict limitations on the use of e-voting
machines (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/06/california_evoting_decertification/)
from all four companies doing business in the state.

The move has made her unpopular in some circles, and she directed a few
choice words to her critics.

"I sometimes wonder if those who continue to deny the stunning
insecurities of the electronic voting systems that are on the market are
the soul mates of those who persist in denying the evidence of global
warming," she said. In either case, the risk of error is so grave that
"the price of prevention is a lot lower than the cost of allowing the
unwanted consequences of not taking action."

During Bowen's top-to-bottom review, a team of computer scientists
uncovered a bevy of vulnerabilities that could allow someone to rig
elections by making wholesale changes to voting results. Vulnerabilities
included the ability to overwrite firmware, install malicious
applications, forge voter cards and gain access to the inside of voting
machines by unfastening screws that were supposed to be inaccessible.
Gear made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic and Premier Election
Solutions (formerly Diebold) were all implicated. Products by Election
Systems and Software wasn't included because the manufacturer refused to
comply with the study.

By contrast, Bowen said, simple optical scanners reading paper ballots
are much harder to hack, provided a statistically significant sample are
manually checked against the results contained in databases. California
law requires 1 per cent of ballots to be hand-checked in every race,
except when a race is decided by a 0.5 per cent or less margin, in which
case 10 per cent of ballots must be randomly audited.

"Paper ballots can be altered too, but it takes a retail,
ballot-by-ballot process to do that," she said.

Lest anyone think e-voting is just another fanboi debate, Bowen reminded
attendees that hanging in the balance of the controversy is nothing short
of the future of civilization.

"Elections are important because in a democracy, that is how we transfer
power in an orderly manner," she said. "That is how we decide what our
collective will is and how we have chosen to give up bullets and instead
rely on ballots. It is really critical for us to get this right." ®

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