“Criminy,” he said. “You’ve got four different vendors. Why should their source codes be private? You’ve privatized the essential building block of the election system.”

-Jeff Hastings, Republican head of election board, Cuyahoga County, Ohio

This year, if you find yourself standing at a touch-screen voting machine, consider this: How the machine actually tallies your votes is secret. The programming in the machines paid for by taxpayer dollars, used in public elections of our public officials, is considered by the machines' manufacturers to be a proprietary secret.

If we did the same thing for paper ballots, a private company would collect the ballots, count the votes in secret, in a locked room, without any public or bipartisan supervision, and then emerge with what it says are the results. Would the American public stand for that? I think not.

So why are voting machines different?

Why do we take out of the public's hands what is arguably our most sacred trust -- counting our votes for our democratically elected leaders -- and hand the job to private corporations to do in secret?

The New York Times covered this issue about a month ago:

As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes....

...[T]he truth is that it’s hard for computer scientists to figure out just how well or poorly the machines are made, because the vendors who make them keep the details of their manufacture tightly held. Like most software firms, they regard their “source code” — the computer programs that run on their machines — as a trade secret. The public is not allowed to see the code, so computer experts who wish to assess it for flaws and reliability can’t get access to it. Felten and voter rights groups argue that this “black box” culture of secrecy is the biggest single problem with voting machines. Because the machines are not transparent, their reliability cannot be trusted....

...The upshot is a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function reliably. The vendors point to the federal and state governments, the federal agency points to the states, the states rely on the federal testing lab and the local officials are frequently hapless.

This has created an environment, critics maintain, in which the people who make and sell machines are now central to running elections. Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines work to maintain or fix them. When a machine crashes or behaves erratically on Election Day, many county elections officials must rely on the vendors — accepting their assurances that the problem is fixed and, crucially, that no votes were altered.

Ugh.

Fox Business reports that 15 of the 24 states with elections this Tuesday are using these electronic voting machines.

The ratings for the 15 states holding presidential primaries on voting machines on Super Tuesday are below. Forty states, including the District of Columbia, are reviewed inside the report. The remaining states were not reviewed since they hold caucuses and do not use electronic voting machines.

State Risk Level

Arkansas HIGH
Delaware HIGH
Georgia HIGH
New Jersey HIGH
New York HIGH
Tennessee HIGH
Alabama MID
Arizona MID
Massachusetts MID
Utah MID
Oklahoma MID
California LOW
Connecticut LOW
Illinois LOW
Missouri LOW

What puzzles me is how some public officials seem to get so hot under the collar when anyone questions the integrity of proprietary voting machines. Watch former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow in this clip from Bill Maher.

Why is this even a partisan issue? The problem with proprietary voting machines is not new, as this 2006 video from Priceton demonstrates.

[More on the Princeton study here.]

And the problems have been plenty! Last year, one researcher proved that E&S voting machines could be hacked using only a Palm Pilot. Check this out:

They also found serious security vulnerabilities involving the magnetically switched bidirectional infrared (IrDA) port on the front of the machines and the memory devices that are used to communicate with the machine through the port. With nothing more than a magnet and an infrared-enabled Palm Pilot or cell phone they could easily read and alter a memory device that is used to perform important functions on the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine -- such as loading the ballot definition file and programming the machine to allow a voter to cast a ballot. They could also use a Palm Pilot to emulate the memory device and hack a voting machine through the infrared port (see the picture above right).

They found that a voter or poll worker with a Palm Pilot and no more than a minute's access to a voting machine could surreptitiously re-calibrate the touch-screen so that it would prevent voters from voting for specific candidates or cause the machine to secretly record a voter's vote for a different candidate than the one the voter chose. Access to the screen calibration function requires no password, and the attacker's actions, the researchers say, would be indistinguishable from the normal behavior of a voter in front of a machine or of a pollworker starting up a machine in the morning.

Would someone actually do this, actually hack an election? This video of "Clint Curtis, a former programmer for Yang Enterprises (YEI) in Florida, testifying under oath that Representative Tom Feeney asked him to write a voting machine program to rig elections" is not reassuring.

[Hat tip to Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.]

The Times reports that the widespread problems with security and reliability have led to backlash.

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4.

But is scrapping the idea of voting machines altogether an answer? What about using a different kind of voting machine -- one that uses open source software that can be inspected by the public to ensure that tallies are fair and the software is secure?

San Luis Obispo County used open source voting machines for their January 12th straw poll. Read about the process. It all seems blinking obvious.

Here's how it worked: Three voting stations were set up with old PCs, monitors, and printers. Our voting software was installed on each PC on top of the Ubuntu operating system. Voters lined up at one table to have their registration confirmed, and were then directed to the sign-in table. After signing-in, they were directed to one of the three voting machines. The only interface devices were a mouse and monitor. They would click on their selection then click on the "print ballot" button. Nothing about the voter's selection was stored on the PC -- the vote exists only on paper. After the ballot came out of the printer, they put it in a privacy folder (file folder cut to 8x12 inches so that barcode on the edge would be exposed) and proceeded to the ballot box. The pollworker at the ballot box would take the folder (faced down) and slide the ballot into the ballot box (ensuring one person one vote).

Voting started at half-past noon and closed at 2:30. Once the polls were closed, the ballot box was opened -- in public, of course. Several people were involved in counting how many ballots were there, putting them into stacks of 25. The counts were double checked. There were 204 ballots just as there was supposed to be since 204 people had signed-in on the roster.

Then, a PC with the tabulation program was hooked up to the projection screen monitor. The screen had the candidate names, all with a zero next to them. The last line showed that ballot count also starting at zero. Marty and a woman (Midori Feldman) that would scan the barcodes sat with their backs to the screen, and they went through the ballots one-by-one. Marty would say the candidate name printed on a ballot then Midori would scan the barcode. The vote would register on the screen and supporters would cheer for their candidate. Everyone got to see each vote increment the count. The fact that the correct candidate selection was encoded in the barcode was proved in this process. Everyone could hear Marty read the name, and everyone could see the vote counted for the candidate. The process left absolutely no doubt about the accuracy of the count.

It was a small poll, but there's no reason why it can't run on a larger scale. Open source software is the basis for a lot of large-scale and complex applications. Some of the largest internet industries, including Google, run on open source Linux. Most blogs and online communities, including Facebook and BlogHer, are powered by open source software.

Is this a pipe dream? Not if you consider how voting machine manufacturer Diebold is feeling the pressure:

Amazingly, the Diebold spokesman, Chris Riggall, admitted to me that the company is considering making the software open source on its next generation of touch-screen machines, so that anyone could download, inspect or repair the code. The pressure from states is growing, he added, and “if the expectations of our customers change, we’ll have to respond to that reality.”

So while you cast your vote this election season -- and do vote, no matter what you think about voting machines -- consider that it the entire process can be more secure, more open and, most important, completely accurate. We can do better.

For more information

* Open Voting Consortium

*Electronic Frontier Foundation

*Common Cause Voting Risk Report (pdf)

Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision.