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Did NJ election officials fail to respect court order to improve security of elections?

September 16, 2011 by

Part 2 of 4
The Gusciora case was filed in 2004 by the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic on behalf of Reed Gusciora and other public-interest plaintiffs. The Plaintiffs sought to end the use of paperless direct-recording electronic voting machines, which are very vulnerable to fraud and manipulation via replacement of their software. The defendant was the Governor of New Jersey, and as governors came and went it was variously titled Gusciora v. McGreevey, Gusciora v. Corzine, Guscioria v. Christie.

In 2010 Judge Linda Feinberg issued an Opinion. She did not ban the machines, but ordered the State to implement several kinds of security measures: some to improve the security of the computers on which ballots are programmed (and results are tabulated), and some to improve the security of the computers inside the voting machines themselves.

The Plaintiffs had shown evidence that ballot-programming computers (the so-called “WinEDS laptops”) in Union County had been used to surf the Internet even on election day in 2008. This, combined with many other security vulnerabilities in the configuration of Microsoft Windows, left the computers open to intrusion by outsiders, who could then interfere with and manipulate the programming of ballots before their installation on the voting machines, or manipulate the aggregation of results after the elections. Judge Feinberg also heard testimony that so-called “Hardening Guidelines”, which had previously been prepared by Sequoia Voting Systems at the request of the State of California, would help close some of these vulnerabilities. Basically, one wipes the hard drive clean on the “WinEDS laptop”, installs a fresh copy of Microsoft Windows, runs a script to shut down Internet access and generally tighten the Windows security configuration, and finally installs a fresh copy of the WinEDS ballot software. The Court also heard testimony (from me) that installing these Guidelines requires experience in Windows system administration, and would likely be beyond the capability of some election administrators.

Among the several steps the Court ordered in 2010 was the installation of these Hardening Guidelines on every WinEDS ballot-programming computer used in public elections, within 120 days.

Two years after I testified in the Gusciora case, I served as an expert witness in a different case, Zirkle v. Henry, in a different Court, before Judge David Krell. I wanted to determine whether an anomaly in the June 2011 Cumberland County primary election could have been caused by an intruder from the Internet, or whether such intrusion could reasonably be ruled out. Thus, the question became relevant of whether Cumberland County’s WinEDS laptop was in compliance with Judge Feinberg’s Order. That is, had the Hardening Guidelines been installed before the ballot programming was done for the election in question? If so, what would the event logs say about the use of that machine as the ballot cartridges were programmed?

One of the components of the Hardening Guidelines is to turn on certain Event Logs in the Windows operating system. So, during my examination of the WinEDS laptop on August 17, I opened the Windows Event Viewer and photographed screen-shots of the logs. To my surprise, the logs commenced on the afternoon of August 16, 2011, the day before my examination. Someone had wiped the logs clean, at the very least, or possibly on August 16 someone had wiped the entire hard drive clean in installing the Hardening Guidelines. In either case, evidence in a pending court case–files on a computer that the State of New Jersey and County of Cumberland had been ordered to produce for examination–was erased. I’m told that evidence-tampering is a crime. In an affidavit dated August 24, Jason Cossaboon, a Computer Systems Analyst employed by Cumberland County, stated that he erased the event logs on August 16.

Robert Giles, Director of the New Jersey Division of Elections, was present during my examination on August 17. Mr. Giles submitted to Judge David Krell an affidavit dated August 25 describing the steps he had taken to achieve compliance with Judge Feinberg’s Order. He writes, “The Sequoia hardening manual was sent, by email, to the various county election offices on March 29, 2010. To my knowledge, the hardening process was completed by the affected counties by the required deadline of June 1, 2010.” Mr. Giles does not say anything about how he acquired the “knowledge” that the process was completed.

Mr. Giles was present in Judge Feinberg’s courtroom in 2009 when I testified that the Hardening Guidelines are not simple to install and would typically require someone with technical training or experience. And yet he then pretended to discharge the State’s duty of compliance with Judge Feinberg’s Order by simply sending a mass e-mail to county election officials. Judge Feinberg herself said that sending an e-mail was not enough; a year later, Mr. Giles has done nothing more. In my opinion, this is disrespectful to the Court, and to the voters of New Jersey.

Filed Under: Other Topics, Privacy & Security Tagged With: ,

NJ election cover-up

September 13, 2011 by

Part 1 of 4
During the June 2011 New Jersey primary election, something went wrong in Cumberland County, which uses Sequoia AVC Advantage direct-recording electronic voting computers. From this we learned several things:

  1. New Jersey court-ordered election-security measures have not been effectively implemented.
  2. There is a reason to believe that New Jersey election officials have destroyed evidence in a pending court case, perhaps to cover up the noncompliance with these measures or to cover up irregularities in this election. There is enough evidence of a cover-up that a Superior Court judge has referred the matter to the State prosecutor’s office.
  3. Like any DRE voting machine, the AVC Advantage is vulnerable to software-based vote stealing by replacing the internal vote-counting firmware. That kind of fraud probably did not occur in this case. But even without replacing the internal firmware, the AVC Advantage voting machine is vulnerable to the accidental or deliberate swapping of vote-totals between candidates. It is clear that the machine misreported votes in this election, and both technical and procedural safeguards proved ineffective to fully correct the error.

Cumberland County is in the extreme southern part of New Jersey, a three-hour drive south of New York. In follow-up posts I’ll explain my 3 conclusions. In the remainder of this post, I’ll quote verbatim from the Honorable David E. Krell, the Superior Court judge in Cumberland County. This is his summary of the case, taken from the trial transcript of September 1, 2011, in the matter of Zirkle v. Henry.

(click here to continue)

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Why seals can't secure elections

April 4, 2011 by

Over the last few weeks, I’ve described the chaotic attempts of the State of New Jersey to come up with tamper-indicating seals and a seal use protocol to secure its voting machines.

A seal use protocol can allow the seal user to gain some assurance that the sealed material has not been tampered with. But here is the critical problem with using seals in elections: Who is the seal user that needs this assurance? It is not just election officials: it is the citizenry.

Democratic elections present a uniquely difficult set of problems to be solved by a security protocol. In particular, the ballot box or voting machine contains votes that may throw the government out of office. Therefore, it’s not just the government—that is, election officials—that need evidence that no tampering has occurred, it’s the public and the candidates. The election officials (representing the government) have a conflict of interest; corrupt election officials may hire corrupt seal inspectors, or deliberately hire incompetent inspectors, or deliberately fail to train them. Even if the public officials who run the elections are not at all corrupt, the democratic process requires sufficient transparency that the public (and the losing candidates) can be convinced that the process was fair.

In the late 19th century, after widespread, pervasive, and long-lasting fraud by election officials, democracies such as Australia and the United States implemented election protocols in an attempt to solve this problem. The struggle to achieve fair elections lasted for decades and was hard-fought.

A typical 1890s solution works as follows: At the beginning of election day, in the polling place, the ballot box is opened so that representatives of all political parties can see for themselves that it is empty (and does not contain hidden compartments). Then the ballot box is closed, and voting begins. The witnesses from all parties remain near the ballot box all day, so they can see that no one opens it and no one stuffs it. The box has a mechanism that rings a bell whenever a ballot is inserted, to alert the witnesses. At the close of the polls, the ballot box is opened, and the ballots are counted in the presence of witnesses.

drawing of 1890 polling place
(From Elements of Civil Government by Alexander L. Peterman, 1891)

In principle, then, there is no single person or entity that needs to be trusted: the parties watch each other. And this protocol needs no seals at all!

Democratic elections pose difficult problems not just for security protocols in general, but for seal use protocols in particular. Consider the use of tamper-evident security seals in an election where a ballot box is to be protected by seals while it is transported and stored by election officials out of the sight of witnesses. A good protocol for the use of seals requires that seals be chosen with care and deliberation, and that inspectors have substantial and lengthy training on each kind of seal they are supposed to inspect. Without trained inspectors, it is all too easy for an attacker to remove and replace the seal without likelihood of detection.

Consider an audit or recount of a ballot box, days or weeks after an election. It reappears to the presence of witnesses from the political parties from its custody in the hands of election officials. The tamper evident seals are inspected and removed—but by whom?

If elections are to be conducted by the same principles of transparency established over a century ago, the rationale for the selection of particular security seals must be made transparent to the public, to the candidates, and to the political parties. Witnesses from the parties and from the public must be able to receive training on detection of tampering of those particular seals. There must be (the possibility of) public debate and discussion over the effectiveness of these physical security protocols.

It is not clear that this is practical. To my knowledge, such transparency in seal use protocols has never been attempted.


Bibliographic citation for the research paper behind this whole series of posts:
Security Seals On Voting Machines: A Case Study, by Andrew W. Appel. Accepted for publication, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), 2011.

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Seals on NJ voting machines, as of 2011

March 21, 2011 by

Part of a multipart series starting here.

During the NJ voting-machines trial, plaintiffs’ expert witness Roger Johnston testified that the State’s attempt to secure its AVC Advantage voting machines was completely ineffective: the seals were ill-chosen, the all-important seal use protocol was entirely missing, and anyway the physical design of this voting machine makes it practically impossible to secure using seals.

Of course, the plaintiffs’ case covered many things other than security seals. And even if the seals could work perfectly, how could citizens know that fraudulent vote-miscounting software hadn’t been perfectly sealed into the voting machine?

Still, it was evident from Judge Linda Feinberg’s ruling, in her Opinion of February 2010, that she took very seriously Dr. Johnston’s testimony about the importance of a seal use protocol. She ordered,


4. SEALS AND SEAL-USE PROTOCOLS (REQUIRED)

For a system of tamper-evident seals to provide effective protection seals must be consistently installed, they must be truly tamper-evident, and they must be consistently inspected. While the new seals proposed by the State will provide enhanced security and protection against intruders, it is critical for the State to develop a seal protocol, in writing, and to provide appropriate training for individuals charged with seal inspection. Without a seal-use protocol, use of tamper-evident seals significantly reduces their effectiveness.

The court directs the State to develop a seal-use protocol. This shall include a training curriculum and standardized procedures for the recording of serial numbers and maintenance of appropriate serial number records.

(With regard to other issues, she ordered improvements to the security of computers used to prepare ballot definitions and aggregate vote totals; criminal background checks for workers who maintain and transport voting machines; better security for voting machines when they are stored at polling places before elections; that election computers not be connected to the Internet; and better training for election workers in “protocols for the chain of custody and maintenance of election records.”)

Judge Feinberg gave the State until July 2010 to come up with a seal use protocol. The State missed this deadline, but upon being reminded of the deadline, they submitted to the Court some woefully inadequate sketches for such a protocol. The Court rejected these sketches, and told them to come up with a real protocol. In September 2010 they tried again with a lengthier document that was still short on specifics, and the Court again found this inadequate. In October 2010 they tried again, asking for another 12-month extension, which the judge granted. In addition they proposed some new seal protocols, but asked the Court not to show them to Plaintiffs’ experts–which is most unusual in the tradition of Anglo-American law, where the Court is supposed to hear from both sides before a finding of fact. By March 2011, Judge Feinberg has not yet decided whether the State has a seal use protocol in compliance with her Order.

I’ve been observing the New Jersey Division of Elections quite closely over the past few years, as this litigation has dragged on. In some things they do a pretty good job: they are competent at voter registration, and they do maintain enough polling places so that the lines don’t get long—and these are basics of election administration that we should not take for granted. But with regard to the security of their voting machines, they just don’t get it. These direct-recording electronic voting machines are inherently insecure, and in the period 2008-2010 they have applied no fewer than six different ad-hoc “patches” to try to secure these machines: four different seal regimes, followed by three different documents claiming to be seal use protocols.

Is the New Jersey Division of Elections deliberately stalling, preserving insecure elections by dragging this case out, always proposing too little, too late and always requesting another extension? Or do they just not care, so through their lack of attention they always propose too little, too late and always request another extension? Even if the Division of Elections could come up with a seal use protocol that the Court would accept, how could we believe that these Keystone Kops could have the follow-through, the “security culture”, to execute such a protocol in the decades to come?

These voting machines are inherently insecure. The State claims they could be made secure with good seals. That’s not true: even with perfect seals and a perfectly executed seal-use protocol, there is the danger of locking fraudulent software securely into the voting machine! But even on its own flawed terms–trying to solve the problem with seals insead of with an inherently auditable technology–the State is failing to execute.

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Seals on NJ voting machines, March 2009

March 7, 2011 by

During the NJ voting-machines trial, both Roger Johnston and I showed different ways of removing all the seals from voting machines and putting them back without evidence of tampering. The significance of this is that one can then install fraudulent vote-stealing software in the computer.

The State responded by switching seals yet again, right in the middle of the trial! They replaced the white vinyl adhesive-tape seal with a red tape seal that has an extremely soft and sticky adhesive. In addition, they proposed something really wacky: they would squirt superglue into the blue padlock seal and into the security screw cap.

Nothing better illustrates the State’s “band-aid approach, where serious security vulnerabilities can be covered over with ad hoc fixes” (as Roger characterizes it) than this. The superglue will interfere with the ability for election workers to (legitimately) remove the seal to maintain the machine. The superglue will make it more difficult to detect tampering, because it goes on in such a variable way that the inspector doesn’t know what’s supposed to be “normal.” And the extremely soft adhesive on the tape seal is extremely difficult to clean up, when the election worker (legitimately) removes it to maintain the machine. Of course, one must clean up all the old adhesive before resealing the voting machine.

Furthermore, Roger demonstrated for the Court that all these seals can still be defeated, with or without the superglue. Here’s the judge’s summary of his testimony about all these seals:


New Jersey is proposing to add six different kinds of seals in nine different locations to the voting machines. Johnston testified he has never witnessed this many seals applied to a system. At most, Johnston has seen three seals applied to high-level security applications such as nuclear safeguards. According to Johnston, there is recognition among security professionals that the effective use of a seal requires an extensive use protocol. Thus, it becomes impractical to have a large number of seals installed and inspected. He testified that the use of a large number of seals substantially decreases security, because attention cannot be focused for a very long time on any one of the seals, and it requires a great deal more complexity for these seal-use protocols and for training.

For more details and pictures of these seals, see “Seal Regime #4” in this paper.

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