Why e-Voting stinks

By Dave Moore, 11-12-06

By in large, our government systems and agencies do a fairly good job.  Services and protections are provided, and things generally flow in a positive way.  If they didn't, our country would be in total chaos.

Nevertheless, sometimes an idea comes along that is so poorly conceived, planned and implemented that it seems there could be no debate that the idea must be fixed or scrapped.  Yet, for some inexplicable reason, government officials and business big-shots keep supporting this bad idea, and seem determined to push it through to the ugly end, no matter what the cost.  It sometimes makes you wonder, "Who are these people?  Where did they come from?  How did they get to be in charge?  Why is it so hot around here, and why are we all sitting in this handbasket?"  Such is the case with advanced "electronic voting," or "e-Voting" schemes.

We in Oklahoma have been blessed for many years with relatively efficient, accurate and trouble-free voting machines.  You indicate your voting choice by using a felt-tip marker to connect two fragments of an arrow on a paper ballot, and feed the ballot into a machine that does an optical scan for complete arrows.  There have been glitches, as there are with all machines.  However, major problems have been few and far between, with Oklahoma's voting machine systems being statistically superior to those in most other states.

After the hanging-chad debacles of the 2000 presidential election (what a brilliant idea -- you have to use your pen to poke holes through a piece of paper in order to vote), the Feds mandated that nation-wide voting systems had to improve.  Sadly, in a rush to embrace a "technologically superior" electronic, computerized voting system, many states are making some tragically bad choices.

Case-in-point are the "e-Voting" systems made by security giant Diebold.  Known mostly as a manufacturer of bank vaults, ATM machines and safes, Diebold sprang on the
e-Voting scene shortly after the 2000 elections, promoting itself as an expert in building computerized voting machines.  Ridiculously large, multi-million dollar contracts with numerous state governments resulted in Diebold being the sole provider of e-Voting technology to countless jurisdictions.

The problem with the Diebold e-Voting machines, and indeed, many providers of like technology, is that nobody in government or the general population knows how they work.  That is, with the exception of the mutually exclusive/supportive communities of private security research and the computer hacker underground.

Taking a stunningly arrogant position, Diebold steadfastly refuses to reveal or explain its proprietary programming code to the very governments whose fair elections depend on the accuracy, stability and security of that code.  Stranger still is that any government would go along with such a closed-ended deal.  However, this insane situation has not stopped the security researchers and computer hackers of the world, who have already publicly demonstrated that the Diebold technology can easily be hacked, cracked and exploited to influence an election's outcome.  Could this be due to the fact that the Diebold system runs on -- you guessed it -- Microsoft Windows?  Remember when Diebold ATMs crashed nationwide in 2003 due to a security flaw in Windows XP?  Yikes!