On The Security of Ballot Marking Devices

A recent debate among election experts has considered whether electronic ballot marking devices (BMDs) have adequate security against the risks of malware. A malicious BMD might produce a printed ballot that disagrees with a voter's actual intent, with the hope that voters would be unlikely to detect this subterfuge. This essay considers how an election administrator can create reasonable auditing procedures to gain confidence that their fleet of BMDs is operating correctly, allowing voters to benefit from the usability and accessibility features of BMDs while the overall election still benefits from the same security and reliability properties we expect from hand-marked paper ballots.Comment: Major revision relative to the August draf

Vendors are Undermining the Structure of U.S. Elections

As we approach the 2008 general election, the structure of elections in the United States -- once reliant on local representatives accountable to the public -- has become almost wholly dependent on large corporations, which are not accountable to the public. Most local officials charged with running elections are now unable to administer elections without the equipment, services, and trade-secret software of a small number of corporations. If the vendors withdrew their support for elections now, our election structure would collapse. Case studies presented in this report give examples of the pervasive control voting system vendors now have over election administration in almost every state, and the consequences some jurisdictions are already experiencing.However, some states and localities are recognizing the threat that vendor-dependency poses to elections. They are using ingenuity and determination to begin reversing the direction. This report examines the situation, how we got here, and steps we can take to limit corporate control of our elections in 2008 and reduce it even further in the future

Back to Paper: A Case Study

Documents the developments in California, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Ohio, where electronic voting machines were introduced after the 2000 election but are now being replaced by paper ballots. Also discusses trends among other states

Improving Access to Voting: A Report on the Technology for Accessible Voting Systems

Twenty percent of U.S. adults with disabilities--more than 8 million eligible voters--say they have been unable to vote in presidential or congressional elections due to barriers at or getting to the polls. Improving Access to Voting is a new report by technology expert Noel Runyan, published by Demos and Voter Action, that finds that state voting systems are widely noncompliant with federal ADA and HAVA access requirements for voters with disabilities

Spartan Daily, February 25, 2020

Volume 154, Issue 14https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2020/1013/thumbnail.jp

Testing Cannot Tell Whether Ballot-Marking Devices Alter Election Outcomes

Like all computerized systems, ballot-marking devices (BMDs) can be hacked, misprogrammed, and misconfigured. Several approaches to testing BMDs have been proposed. In _logic and accuracy_ (_L&A_) tests, trusted agents input known test patterns into the BMD and check whether the printout matches. In _parallel_ or _live_ testing, agents use the BMDs on election day, emulating voters. In _passive_ testing, agents monitor the rate at which voters "spoil" ballots and request another opportunity to mark a ballot: an anomalously high rate might result from BMD malfunctions. In practice, none of these methods can protect against outcome-altering problems. L&A testing is ineffective in part because BMDs "know" the time and date of the test and the election. Neither L&A nor parallel testing can probe even a small fraction of the possible voting transactions that could comprise enough votes to change outcomes. Under mild assumptions, to develop a model of voter interactions with BMDs accurate enough to ensure that parallel tests could reliably detect changes to 5% of the votes (which could change margins by 10% or more) would require monitoring the behavior of more than a million voters in each jurisdiction in minute detail---but the median turnout by jurisdiction in the U.S. is under 3000 voters. Given an accurate model of voter behavior, the number of tests required is still larger than the turnout in a typical U.S. jurisdiction. Under optimistic assumptions, passive testing that has a 99% chance of detecting a 1% change to the margin with a 1% false alarm rate is impossible in jurisdictions with fewer than about 1 million voters, even if the "normal" spoiled ballot rate were known exactly and did not vary from election to election and place to place