Friday, October 31, 2008

UConn, MIT help tackle voting tech security

By Brendan Lynch

Touch-screen voting machines once seemed poised to revolutionize the way Americans vote, but local researchers are focusing on the lowest of low technology — paper — to secure U.S. elections. 

Since 2006, University of Connecticut computer science professor Alexander Shvartsman has been working with the state of Connecticut to find vulnerabilities in the state’s optical scan vote counting machines — 20-year-old technology that reads pen marks on paper ballots. Shvartsman’s team checks the vote-tabulating software on the machines’ memory cards before and after elections, making sure that no extra code has been added, previous election results have been cleared before a new vote, and ballot ovals correspond to the correct candidate.

Shvartsman found the cards have a 5 percent failure rate — not a huge problem, since a machine with a faulty card won’t work at all, and poll workers have backups. But the failure rate is unusually high for computer components.

LHS Associates Inc., a privately held company in Methuen, installs the code on cards used in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. CEO John Silvestro called the 5 percent failure rate a statistical anomaly, and said LHS provides election officials with backup cards free of charge for that reason.

Shvartsman said that Connecticut officials retained him after individuals posted comments on the Internet hinting at improprieties by LHS. However, Shvartsman said he has never found evidence of malicious tampering. Silvestro said he used to pay attention to the Internet chatter from “activists” and “treehuggers,” but stopped after it got too agitating.

“One guy sent me a picture of Concord State Prison and said, ‘Hey, this is going to be your future home,’” he said.

In the run-up to next week’s election, Shvartsman’s team is monitoring the programming and physical chain of custody of a selection of the cards, and plan to audit all of the cards used in the election after November 4.  

More advanced voting technology is easy enough to develop, but it’s impractical to implement state by state, Shvartsman said. After the disputed 2000 presidential election, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 led to the introduction of paperless touch-screen machines in many states. Without a paper trail, the computer counts were unverifiable. Most states have since regressed to optical scan machines.

In that spirit, MIT researchers are working on Scantegrity II, which would piggyback on optical scan systems. Scantegrity II allows voters to confirm their votes have been counted using invisible ink, according to computer science professor Ron Rivest. Using a special pen, filling out a ballot would reveal a code. Voters would enter the code into a website to verify the inclusion of their votes in the election’s final tally. The identity of the candidate would remain anonymous, since that could create a market for votes, Rivest said.

The researchers are talking to Maryland officials about implementing Scantegrity II in elections there next year, Rivest said.

BBN Technologies Corp. security researcher Peiter “Mudge” Zatko said touch-screens would work fine as long as they also produce a paper trail against which to verify the tally.

Zatko said the gambling industry could provide a model for election security — gambling machines undergo several rounds of audits.

“People get really bent out of shape if they think their video poker machine is rigged,” Zatko said. “They should get just as (angry) about voting machines.”