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E-Voting Links for Election Day

November 2, 2010 by

Today, of course, is Election Day in the U.S. Many of our U.S. readers will be casting their votes electronically.

CITP has been front and center on the e-voting issue. Here’s a quick set of CITP e-voting links:

Finally, in keeping with tradition here, on Election Day I post photos of unguarded voting machines in the Princeton area. Here are two photos taken over the weekend:

[This entry was updated at 1:00 PM Eastern on 2 Nov 2010, to add the Checkoway et al. item.]

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NJ court permits release of post-trial briefs in voting case

October 27, 2010 by

In 2009 the Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division, held a trial on the legality of using paperless direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. Plaintiffs in the suit argued that because it’s so easy to replace the software in a DRE with fraudulent software that cheats in elections, DRE voting systems do not guarantee the substantive right to vote (and to have one’s vote counted) required by the New Jersey constitution and New Jersey statutory law.

I described this trial in three articles last year: trial update, summary of plaintiffs’ witnesses’ testimony, and summary of defense witnesses’ testimony.

Normally in a lawsuit, the courtroom is open. The public can attend all legal proceedings. Additionally, plaintiffs are permitted to explain their case to the public by releasing their post-trial briefs (“proposed findings of fact” and “proposed conclusions of law”). But in this suit the Attorney General of New Jersey, representing the defendants in this case, argued that the courtroom be closed for parts of the proceedings, and asked the Court to keep all post-trial documents from the public, indefinitely.

More than a year after the trial ended, the Court finally held a hearing to determine whether post-trial documents should be kept from the public. The Attorney General’s office failed to even articulate a legal argument for keeping the briefs secret.

So, according to a Court Order of October 15, 2010, counsel for the plaintiffs (Professor Penny Venetis of Rutgers Law School aided by litigators from Patton Boggs LLP) are now free to show you the details of their legal argument.

The briefs are available here:
Plaintiffs’ Proposed Findings of Fact
Plaintiffs’ Proposed Conclusions of Law

I am now free to tell you all sorts of interesting things about my hands-on experiences with (supposedly) tamper-evident security seals. I published some preliminary findings in 2008. Over the next few weeks I’ll post a series of articles about the limitations of tamper-evident seals in securing elections.

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Court permits release of unredacted report on AVC Advantage

October 13, 2010 by

In the summer of 2008 I led a team of computer scientists in examining the hardware and software of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. I did this as a pro-bono expert witness for the Plaintiffs in the New Jersey voting-machine lawsuit. We were subject to a Protective Order that, in essence, permitted publication of our findings but prohibited us from revealing any of Sequoia’s trade secrets.

At the end of August 2008, I delivered my expert report to the court, and prepared it for public release as a technical report with the rest of my team as coauthors. Before we could release that report, Sequoia intervened with the Court, claiming that we were revealing trade secrets. We had been very careful not to reveal trade secrets, so we disputed Sequoia’s claim. In October 2008 the Court ruled mostly in our favor on this issue, permitting us to release the report with some redactions,and reserving a decision on those redacted sections until later.

The hearing on those sections has finally arrived, completely vindicating our claim that the original report was within the parameters of the Protective Order. On October 5, 2010 Judge Linda Feinberg signed an order permitting me to release the original, unredacted expert report, which is now available here.

If you’re curious, you can look at paragraphs 19.8, 19.9, 21.3, and 21.5, as well as Appendices B through G, all of which were blacked out in our previously released report.

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Indian E-Voting Researcher Freed After Seven Days in Police Custody

August 28, 2010 by

FLASH: 4:47 a.m. EDT August 28 — Indian e-voting researcher Hari Prasad was released on bail an hour ago, after seven days in police custody. Magistrate D. H. Sharma reportedly praised Hari and made strong comments against the police, saying Hari has done service to his country. Full post later today.

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Update: Indian E-Voting Researcher Remains in Police Custody

August 26, 2010 by

Update: 8/28 Indian E-Voting Researcher Freed After Seven Days in Police Custody

In case you’re just tuning in, e-voting researcher Hari Prasad, with whom I coauthored a paper exposing serious flaws in India’s electronic voting machines (EVMs), was arrested Saturday morning at his home in Hyderabad. The arresting officers told him they were acting under “pressure [from] the top,” and demanded that he disclose the identity of the anonymous source who provided the voting machine that we studied. Since then, Hari has been held in custody by the Mumbai police and repeatedly questioned.

Recent Developments

There have several developments in Hari’s case since my last post.

On Sunday, about 28 hours after his arrest, Hari appeared before a magistrate in Mumbai and was formally charged for the first time. The officers who arrested him had not stated a specific charge, but they had told him he would be left alone if he would reveal the identity of the source who provided us the machine . Hari has not named the source, and the authorities are now alleging that he took the machine from the government’s warehouse himself.

Specifically, he was charged under Section 454 of the Indian Penal Code (“lurking house-trespass or house-breaking in order to commit [an] offence punishable with imprisonment”), Section 457 (“lurking house trespass or house-breaking by night in order to commit an offence punishable with imprisonment”) and Section 380 (“theft in [a] dwelling house”).

These charges are without merit. Hari has never denied having been in possession of a machine—we even held it up for a photograph to accompany our paper—but the police have offered no evidence whatsoever that Hari ever trespassed in a government warehouse, much less stole a voting machine or anything else from one.

As I have previously stated, Hari obtained access to the machine from a source who approached him earlier this year. We have every reason to believe that the source had lawful access to the machine and made it available for scientific study as a matter of conscience, out of concern over potential security problems.

At Sunday’s hearing, Hari was remanded in police custody until today, when he appeared again before a magistrate and requested bail on medical grounds. (He is reported to be suffering from breathing problems.) The court refused to entertain the bail request and instead granted a police request that Hari remain in custody. The next hearing is scheduled for Saturday, at which time Hari can again seek bail.

One positive development is that Hari’s legal team now includes Mahesh Jethmalani and his father, Ram Jethmalani. I am told they are among the most sought after defense lawyers in India.

Keeping Sight of the Facts

Hari’s arrest has provoked explosive debate in India, not only about the arrest’s apparent political motives, but also about much broader questions our study raised over the security and transparency of India’s voting system. In the midst of this emotionally charged debate, I think it would be helpful to reiterate what our study does and does not reveal.

What the study I coauthored with Hari Prasad shows is essentially two things:

First, far from being “tamperproof,” India’s EVMs are vulnerable to most of the same security problems as the paper ballots they replaced—including an electronic form of booth capturing. Any time during or after the election, dishonest election insiders or other criminals with physical access to the machines can alter the votes stored inside.

Second, unlike the old paper ballot boxes, the EVMs can be tampered with long before elections take place to cause fraudulent results in the future. In other words, a dishonest insider or other criminal could manipulate an EVM today and have it steal votes months or years from now. You can’t do that with a ballot box.

What our study doesn’t show is that any election has ever been stolen by tampering with EVMs. Today’s EVMs are susceptible to tampering, and such tampering has the potential to change results in national elections, but our study does not even attempt to show that any past election result is invalid. Nobody can reasonably claim, based solely on the results we’ve presented, that an election now settled should be overturned.

Now that we know that EVMs have these vulnerabilities, it’s time for the Election Commission of India to stop pretending that the machines used today are perfect, and start working with India’s academic and technical communities to create a voting system that is worthy of voters’ trust.

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