E-Voting Tests Get Failing Grade By Kim Zetter Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65535,00.html
02:00 AM Nov. 01, 2004 PT
In 1996, a federal testing lab responsible for evaluating voting systems in the United States examined the software for a new electronic voting machine made by I-Mark Systems of Omaha, Nebraska.
The tester included a note in the lab's report praising the system for having the best voting software he had ever seen, particularly the security and use of encryption.
Doug Jones, Iowa's chief examiner of voting equipment and a computer scientist at the University of Iowa, was struck by this note. Usually testers are careful to be impartial.
But Jones was not impressed with the system. Instead, he found poor design that used an outdated encryption scheme proven to be insecure. He later wrote that such a primitive system "should never have come to market."
But come to market it did. By 1997, I-Mark had been purchased by Global Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, which in turn was purchased by Diebold in 2002. Diebold marketed the I-Mark machine as the AccuVote-TS and subsequently signed an exclusive $54 million contract to supply Georgia with the touch-screen machines statewide. In 2003, Maryland signed a similar agreement.
Last year, computer scientists found that the Diebold system still possessed the same flaws Jones had flagged six years earlier, despite subsequent rounds of testing.
"I thought surely something must have changed in all of that time," Jones said. "There's really very little excuse for the examiners not to have noticed."
Before 1990, the United States had no standards for testing and evaluating voting equipment. Anyone who wanted to make a voting system and sell it to election officials could do so. In 1990, the Federal Election Commission tried to address that weakness by establishing national standards for designing and testing voting equipment. Accredited labs were established to evaluate systems at the federal level, while states instituted processes to perform additional testing at the local level.
Election officials point to this "rigorous" testing according to standards as evidence that the current e-voting systems are fine. But a study (http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/hava/files/compuware.pdf) commissioned by Ohio last year found that all of the top e-voting systems had security flaws that testers failed to catch.
The certification process is, in fact, rife with problems, having long been neglected by federal and state authorities who don't have funding or the authority from Congress to oversee the process properly.
The problems arise because:
• The "independent testing labs," or ITAs, that test voting systems are not completely independent of the companies that make the voting equipment. Although the top level of certification is called "federal testing," private labs with no connection to the government actually conduct the testing. The vendors pay those labs to test their systems, giving the vendors control over such parts of the testing process as who gets to view the results. This lack of transparency means that state officials who buy voting machines seldom know about machine problems that occurred during testing.
• The federal standards for voting systems are flawed. They demand little security from vendors and contain loopholes that allow parts of voting systems to slip through without being tested. An upgrade to the standards is in the works but won't be available until mid-2005 and may not fix all of the standards' flaws.
• Procedures for tracking certified software are poor, so even if labs test voting systems, no one can ensure that the software used in elections is the same software that got tested. California discovered this problem last year when it found that Diebold installed uncertified software on machines in 17 counties.
Despite the problems, few election administrators admit the certification process is inadequate. This doesn't surprise Jones.
"If election officials admit that the standards and certification process are bad, then public confidence in elections is threatened (and) participation in elections will go down," Jones said. "So the question is, do you talk about this? The answer seems to be, for a lot of people in the election community, no."
When the standards came out in 1990, they addressed punch-card, optical-scan and first-generation direct-recording electronic machines, the precursor to today's touch-screen machines. But it took another four years before any testing occurred, because Congress failed to provide the FEC with funds or a mandate to oversee testing............
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