Luther Weeks | CTVotersCount.org

Ballots Still Broken: Doug Jones on Today’s Voting Machines

Broken Ballots co-author, Doug Jones interview on the vulnerabilities of today’s voting machines, the newer models available, risks of Election Management Systems, and Internet voting: Douglas Jones on Today’s Voting Machines <read>

Fortunately, Connecticut has avoided the problem of corruption of the EMS by using a separate system from programming elections and using a manual reporting system to accumulate the results at the end of the night. That does not mean our systems are safe from errors, hacking, and fraud. We need audits that subject every ballot to the potential for audit selection, along with audits of the entire system including the accuracy of the results reporting and totaling.

In my opinion, the benefits of the currently available systems are not enough to justify replacing our current optical scanners. In the next few years we will need to replace them. Odds are a that in five to ten years there will be much better systems available at much lower cost. Worth the wait.

We have also wisely avoided the risks of Internet voting.

Dr. Harri Hursti addresses the potential for Russian election attacks

Dr. Harri Hursti is a respected international expert on electronic security, especially electronic voting. In a recent interview he addressed the risks and chances of correctly attributing the source of attacks, specifically focusing on Russia.

What do you think of the news that a member of Congress says there is “no doubt” that Russia is behind recent attacks on state election systems

The article makes several dangerous assumptions about the security of elections and election systems. Representative Adam Schiff said he doubted (Russians) could falsify a vote tally in a way that effects the election outcome. He also said outdated election systems makes this unlikely, but really, it just makes it easier. The voting machines were designed at a time when security wasn’t considered, included, or part of the specifications at all.

Dr. Harri Hursti is a respected international expert on electronic security, especially electronic voting. CTVotersCount readers may recall his role in the film Hacking Democracy demonstrating the “Hursti Hack” of Connecticut’s voting machines, the AccuVote-OS scanners.

In a recent interview he addressed the risks and chances of correctly attributing the source of attacks, specifically focusing on Russia <read>

What do you think of the news that a member of Congress says there is “no doubt” that Russia is behind recent attacks on state election systems

The article makes several dangerous assumptions about the security of elections and election systems. Representative Adam Schiff said he doubted (Russians) could falsify a vote tally in a way that effects the election outcome. He also said outdated election systems makes this unlikely, but really, it just makes it easier. The voting machines were designed at a time when security wasn’t considered, included, or part of the specifications at all.

These outdated computers are extremely slow. They don’t have the extra horsepower to do decent security on top of the job they were designed for…

So there’s no proof of voter registration tampering?

As in voting machines, the registration machine don’t have the capability of logging an alteration, and they are trivially altered themselves. It’s meaningless to claim there’s no evidence, since the systems don’t have the capability to report when they’re altered…

How can the US be so sure it’s Russia?

It can’t. It is very hard to find from where a network attack is coming from. It is equally easy to make certain that investigators will find “the trail” which is pointing to the wrong direction. Therefore under the assumption that you’re dealing with a skillful attacker, any trail found is a red flag for the fact there are so many ways to make it virtually impossible to find the trail. Any conclusive looking trail “found” should be considered suspect. Unless it’s a false trail, you can only say we suspect them, and until you get to the real people to the level of the actual perpetrators true identities, you can’t make a conclusion as to “where” they come from…

Given your Cold War background, does this feel familiar?

The Cold War was all about ideology, and therefore a large concept was something that we today call hybrid warfare. In that game the actual technological attacks are equally important as the psychological influencing of the general population with misinformation and misdirection. So this is all very familiar.

Also, something we in the Western world don’t understand is how deeply patriotic Russians are. Individual Russians, and self-organized groups, are willing to go to great lengths on their own, with their own initiative, if they believe that what they do will benefit Mother Russia, and/or in hope and believe that their actions once known will be rewarded.

Given your Cold War background, does this feel familiar?

The Cold War was all about ideology, and therefore a large concept was something that we today call hybrid warfare. In that game the actual technological attacks are equally important as the psychological influencing of the general population with misinformation and misdirection. So this is all very familiar.

Also, something we in the Western world don’t understand is how deeply patriotic Russians are. Individual Russians, and self-organized groups, are willing to go to great lengths on their own, with their own initiative, if they believe that what they do will benefit Mother Russia, and/or in hope and believe that their actions once known will be rewarded…

I would suggest reading the complete article. Dr. Hursti provide ans international prospective we do not fully comprehend.

April Presidential Primary Audit – Does Not Make the Grade

Checks on State Voting Machines Do Not Make the Grade
Do Not Provide Confidence in Election System, Says Citizen Audit

From the Press Release:

Audits of the recent presidential primaries are so faulty that exact final vote tallies cannot be verified, says the non-partisan Connecticut Citizen Election Audit. Unless state and local election officials make changes, the same will be true for the November elections.

“State law requires audits to verify the accuracy of optical scanner voting machines as a check for errors and a deterrent to fraud. Local registrars gather officials to manually count paper ballots and compare their totals to the totals found by the scanners”, explains Luther Weeks, Executive Director of Connecticut Citizen Election Audit.

Issues reported by the group were:

Incomplete or missing official reports of vote counts from town registrars;
The lack of action on the part of the Secretary of the State’s Office to check that all required reports are submitted and all submitted reports are completed fully;
Of 169 municipalities required to submit lists of polling places before the election, the Secretary of the State’s Office recorded only 68, with 101 missing;
Poor security procedures to prohibit ballot tampering;
Not following procedures intended to ensure “double checking” and “blind counting” rather than having scanner counts as targets while counting manually;

“The public, candidates, and the Secretary of the State should expect local election officials to organize proper audits and produce accurate, complete audit reports. The public and candidates should expect the Secretary of the State’s Office to take the lead in ensuring the audits are complete. Yet, due to a lack of attention to detail and follow-through the audits do not prove or disprove the accuracy of the reported primary results,” Weeks said.

Checks on State Voting Machines Do Not Make the Grade
Do Not Provide Confidence in Election System, Says Citizen Audit

From the Press Release:

“State law requires audits to verify the accuracy of optical scanner voting machines as a check for errors and a deterrent to fraud. Local registrars gather officials to manually count paper ballots and compare their totals to the totals found by the scanners”, explains Luther Weeks, Executive Director of Connecticut Citizen Election Audit.

Issues reported by the group were:

Incomplete or missing official reports of vote counts from town registrars;
The lack of action on the part of the Secretary of the State’s Office to check that all required reports are submitted and all submitted reports are completed fully;
Of 169 municipalities required to submit lists of polling places before the election, the Secretary of the State’s Office recorded only 68, with 101 missing;
Poor security procedures to prohibit ballot tampering;
Not following procedures intended to ensure “double checking” and “blind counting” rather than having scanner counts as targets while counting manually;

“The public, candidates, and the Secretary of the State should expect local election officials to organize proper audits and produce accurate, complete audit reports. The public and candidates should expect the Secretary of the State’s Office to take the lead in ensuring the audits are complete. Yet, due to a lack of attention to detail and follow-through the audits do not prove or disprove the accuracy of the reported primary results,” Weeks said.

Of Prisons, Water, and Elections

A story about prisons claimed that officials look at a prison as a jug of water. Even with a small pinhole leak, the water will get out. They look for the slightest weakness in the prison, assuming prisoners (with lots of time on their hands, collective wisdom, and little to lose in trying) will find any weakness, no matter how small, difficult, and time consuming.

That is how we should look at voting systems

For justified trust and credibility it is critical that our elections be publicly verifiable.

I don’t have the original quite. A story about prisons claimed that officials look at a prison as a jug of water. Even with a small pinhole leak, the water will get out. They look for the slightest weakness in the prison, assuming prisoners (with lots of time on their hands, collective wisdom, and little to lose in trying) will find any weakness, no matter how small, difficult, and time consuming.

That is how we should look at voting systems: electronic, Internet, mechanical or manual. If there is a weakness in the system, someone motivated will find it and exploit it. When it comes to attaining publicly verifiable results, recounts, and audits, any opening for breaking ballot security or transparency, someone motivated will find it and likely exploit it

For more details, review our Common Sense Series post on Public Transparency and Verifiability <read>

A Meeting, A Hearing, and Lots of Nonsense

In the last two weeks there was a meeting of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and a hearing of the House Science and Technology Committee on “Cyber and Voting Machine Attacks”. In total there were seven “experts” giving their opinions along with many of the committee members giving theirs. For the most part, solid facts and reason were missing. The general plan seemed to be officials going overboard in reassuring the public.

One speaker was featured in both meetings, the Louisiana Secretary of State. He claimed, perhaps half joking, that it would take so many conspirators to rig an election that they would be better off just voting for their candidate — that got a lot of laughs, apparently at the expense of those who think our elections are vulnerable. He also claimed that hacking was hard to do since it takes programming skills. Actually programming skills are quite widely known and there are several ways to hack elections that do not require programming skills.

Another was the Secretary of State of West Virginia. She is widely known as a strong proponent of Internet voting. Readers may recall that she came to Connecticut to tout a pilot of Internet voting that was wisely not continued by the West Virginia Legislature. She also declined to describe new voting security measures she has taken, lest they become known. The EAC Committee seemed to agree with that failed theory, known as Security Through Obscurity.

Ironically, that same Secretary of State from West Virginia was given an award at the meeting by the EAC, partially for her strides in security.

Overall there was too much focus on cyber risks, from foreign powers, and from Russia. In the Committee meeting it was accepted that Russia hacked the DNC, although to our knowledge has not been proven.

There were two highlights.

The statement and comments by Dan Wallach from Rice University, the only true expert on election security present in either meeting.
The opening remarks by the Science and Technology Chair. He made a very clear statement of the importance of fair elections to democracy.

<Video of the Science and Technology Committee Meeting>
Lest some accuse me of being alarmist, let me reiterate and add to my position recently expressed in a letter to the Hartford Courant:

The truth is that there is no more or less risk to elections this year than in the recent past. The bad news is that the risks of election skullduggery are significant and do not come only from one adversary.

The risks come from foreign adversaries, domestic interests, partisans, independent hackers, and election insiders including vendors. Elections can be compromised without access to the Internet, without coding, and without altering computers. Political insiders, especially, have the motives and opportunities.

In any one election race the risks are low to moderate, yet the stakes are high. The closer the vote, the less certain the peoples’ votes were reflected in the declared winner. It is too late to do much before November, yet we should not rest once the election is over and decided. The time for deliberate action is in the months and year or two after a presidential election.

Security Against Election Hacking

From Freedom to Tinker, Andrew Appel: Security against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence <read>

We have heard a lot lately about the vulnerabilities of our elections to hacking. Both cyberhacking and unsophisticated insider attacks. Andrew Appel describes some common sense approaches to detect and deter error and fraud in our elections, covering three major vulnerabilities:

Incorrect or unavailable poolbooks.
Voting machines
Accumulation of results across polling places and jurisdictions

From Freedom to Tinker, Andrew Appel: Security against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence <read>

Incorrect or unavailable poolbooks.
Voting machines
Accumulation of results across polling places and jurisdictions

Any of these computers could be hacked. What defenses do we have? Could we seal off the internet so the Russians can’t hack us? Clearly not; and anyway, maybe the hacker isn’t the Russians—what if it’s someone in your opponent’s political party? What if it’s a rogue election administrator?

The best defenses are ways to audit the election and count the votes outside of, independent of the hackable computers…

So the good news is: our election system has many checks and balances so we don’t have to trust the hackable computers to tell us who won. The biggest weaknesses are DRE paperless touchscreen voting machines used in a few states, which are completely unacceptable; and possible problems with electronic pollbooks.

In this article I’ve discussed paper trails: pollbooks, paper ballots, and per-precinct result printouts. Election officials must work hard to assure the security of the paper trail: chain of custody of ballot boxes once the polls close, for example. And they must use the paper trails to audit the election, to protect against hacked computers (and other kinds of fraud, bugs, and accidental mistakes). Many states have laws requiring (for example) random audits of paper ballots; more states need such laws, and in all states the spirit of the laws must be followed as well as the letter.

Read the full, brief article to understand the details of Appel’s recommendations.

In addition to paying attention to all these recommendations, Connecticut needs to attend to improving our existing post-election audit transparency, the security of ballots, and consider adding formal measures along these lines for check off lists and results reporting.

Letter: Focus on Russia Takes Heat Off Multitude of Election Vulnerabilities

My letter, published in the Courant today:

Many Election Security Risks

The Sept. 6 article “U.S. Fears Russia Hack” [Page 1] provides an inflammatory view of the risks to U.S. elections. Focusing on one potential risk from our current enemy of choice takes the attention off the multitude of risks…
We can do much better in the long run, if the actual risks are not forgotten after November.

A few days ago a Washington Post article, repeated in the Hartford Courant, focused on election risks from our current enemy of choice, Russia <read>. Here is my letter, published in the Courant today:

Many Election Security Risks

The Sept. 6 article “U.S. Fears Russia Hack” [Page 1] provides an inflammatory view of the risks to U.S. elections. Focusing on one potential risk from our current enemy of choice takes the attention off the multitude of risks.

The truth is that there is no more or less risk to elections this year than in the recent past. The bad news is that the risks of election skullduggery are significant and do not come only from one adversary. A report from the Institute for Critical Infrastructure technology says it all: “Hacking Elections is Easy!” The report discusses how our election infrastructure, from voting machines to registration and reporting systems, are all at risk.

In Connecticut, like most states, a disruption in our centralized voter registration system on Election Day or its compromise before voter lists are printed, would disrupt an election. In many municipalities, voted ballots are easily accessible to multiple single individuals, “protected” only by all but useless tamper-evident seals. Partisans run our elections from top to bottom. Most are of high integrity, yet there is high motivation for manipulation.

We can do much better in the long run, if the actual risks are not forgotten after November.

Highly Recommended: Hacking Elections Is Easy!

From the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology: Hacking Elections Is Easy <read>. It is the most layperson accessible comprehensive overview of the problems we face protecting our elections that I have seen in a long time. It is 23 pages yet very readable. The main points are:

We face multiple risks our elections: Registration systems, voting systems, reporting systems, and ballot security.
We face risks from multiple actors: Nations with interests in manipulating our elections, corporations, U.S. Government agencies, sophisticated hackers, and insiders at all levels.
For the unsophisticated, Hacking Is Easy. There are simple insider attacks, simple cyber attacks, and kits on the Internet to compromise results or simply disrupt elections.
Most election officials are of high integrity. Yet, blind trust in all officials, machines, and that hacking is difficult is perhaps our greatest risk.

Just a couple excerpts from the Introduction:

To hack an election, the adversary does not need to exploit a national network of election technology. By focusing on the machines in swing regions of swing states, an election can be hacked without drawing considerable notice. Voter machines, technically, are so riddled with vulnerabilities that even an upstart script kiddie could wreak havoc on a regional election, a hacktivist group could easily exploit a state election, an APT could effortlessly exploit a national election and any corrupt element with nothing more than the ability to describe the desired outcome could order layers of exploits on any of the multitude of deep web forums and marketplaces. Yes, hacking elections is easy…

From the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology: Hacking Elections Is Easy <read>. It is the most layperson accessible comprehensive overview of the problems we face protecting our elections that I have seen in a long time. It is 23 pages yet very readable. The main points are:

We face multiple risks our elections: Registration systems, voting systems, reporting systems, and ballot security.
We face risks from multiple actors: Nations with interests in manipulating our elections, corporations, U.S. Government agencies, sophisticated hackers, and insiders at all levels.
For the unsophisticated, Hacking Is Easy. There are simple insider attacks, simple cyber attacks, and kits on the Internet to compromise results or simply disrupt elections.
Most election officials are of high integrity. Yet, blind trust in all officials, machines, and that hacking is difficult is perhaps our greatest risk.

Just a couple excerpts from the Introduction:

To hack an election, the adversary does not need to exploit a national network of election technology. By focusing on the machines in swing regions of swing states, an election can be hacked without drawing considerable notice. Voter machines, technically, are so riddled with vulnerabilities that even an upstart script kiddie could wreak havoc on a regional election, a hacktivist group could easily exploit a state election, an APT could effortlessly exploit a national election and any corrupt element with nothing more than the ability to describe the desired outcome could order layers of exploits on any of the multitude of deep web forums and marketplaces. Yes, hacking elections is easy…

Manufacturers and voting officials have constructed an illusion of security based on the semblance of complexity when, in reality, voting machines are neither secure or complex. In general, these stripped down computers utilizing outdated operating systems possess virtually every conceivable vulnerability that a device can have…

Attackers’ ability to exploit vulnerabilities in the systems that support the American democratic process is not exclusive to election machines. Catastrophically disrupting the campaign of just about any political candidate can be done with little more than a DDoS attack on fundraising links and web properties, spam widgets on social media platforms, an insider threat who delivers a malicious payload on a USB drive or unsuspectingly by clicking a link in a spear phishing email, and a ransom ware variant to encrypt important donor lists to further cripple fundraising. A pseudo tech savvy adversary could create a network of spoofed sites to confuse voters and this is just the beginning. By combining attack vectors and layering attacks, an adversary can manipulate the democratic process by inciting chaos, imbuing suspicion, or altering results.

an eighteen year-old high school student could compromise a crucial county election in a pivotal swing state with equipment purchased for less than $100, potentially altering the distribution of the state’s electoral votes and thereby influencing the results of the Presidential election…

An unskilled threat actor may begin a campaign by sending phishing emails or using free script
kiddie tools to remotely attack undefended local networks to compromise email and exfiltrate
internal documents that reveal the types of systems used in an election as well as their storage
conditions.

Hack Pointless? Or State of Denial?

Earlier this week Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, ROVAC President Melissa Russell and the Manchester CT Registrars of voters talked to NBC Connecticut. We add some annotation to the transcript, in [Brackets].

Even the machines used to digitally tabulate election results aren’t connected to the internet in cities and towns. Melissa Russell, a Bethlehem Registrar of Voters, with the Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut reiterated the point that physical record keeping in Connecticut places the state at an advantage. [Not having voting systems connected to the Internet is definitely an advantage. Yet, not so much against local insider attacks, especially when local officials and their leaders are so confident (overconfident?)]

Local registrars, like Jim Stevenson and Tim Becker in Manchester, wonder what a hacker could really get from a hack of even a local election computer. [The answer, known for years is: Even skilled amateurs could change the result printed by the scanner. One method is the widely know Hursti Hack. UConn has articulated others. We are left to wonder why NBC did not interview anyone with expertise to answer the registrars questions. ]

NBC Connecticut
CT Election Officials Say a Hack Nearly Pointless
By Max Reiss
CT Election Officials Say a Hack Nearly Pointless
(Published Monday, Aug. 29, 2016)

After the FBI notified election officials nationwide of a hack on election databases in Arizona and Illinois, many went on alert, on the lookout for specific IP addresses. [A word to the wise: There are many IP addresses out there. It is suspicious activity that needs to be guarded against, not particular IP addresses.]

In Connecticut, state election officials said the IP addresses in question haven’t yet shown up on state servers, but added that the information obtained in Illinois, a list of more than 200,000 and their voting data like addresses and phone numbers, are already publicly available in Connecticut. [Yes, but they are available at a price. We might question if Russians or other groups outside of Connecticut asked for a copy. Also all the risks that concern Illinois are still there, if the data are available in a legitimate way, its just a bit easier in Connecticut to obtain.]
“I think someone said it was like hacking the phone book,” quipped Secretary of the State Denise Merrill.
She explained that Connecticut has perhaps the most decentralized voting and registration system in the country with 169 cities and towns that act as their own districts. Built into that system is an entirely paper based trove of voter cards, ballots, and backups. [There are advantages to decentralization, and some downsides. Its much harder to mount a general attack systems across the state. Yet, it is easier to compromise local systems. Local officials are much less capable of protecting systems. Local insider attacks are easier to accomplish. Let us remember that partisan officials have at least as much motivation as the Russians to change results – and local officials have more opportunity. Most election officials are of high integrity, yet they are not immune to the same forces that have landed Connecticut Governors, Mayors, Legislators, and Police in jail.]

“When you go into vote and you go to register on the list, it’s all still on paper so there is no simple database that’s containing all of the information,” Merrill said. [Actually its called the Centralized Voter Registration Database (CVRS). It is vital on election day to accomplish Election Day Registration and check voters who might have been incorrectly registered. That paper list in the polling place is only as good as the CVRS was a few days before the election, when the list was printed. An attack on the CVRS could involve changing many registrations so voters are not registered on election day, or sent absentee ballots to false addresses to be voted illegally. Addresses could have been changed without hacking the CVRS by Online Registration. To do online registration requires a voter’s CT Driver ID. That Driver ID could be obtained by hacking the DMV database, if it is not in the CVRS. (Has anyone checked the security of the DMV database?]

Voter lists themselves are already public records and campaigns purchase lists from the Secretary of the State every year.

Local registrars, like Jim Stevenson and Tim Becker in Manchester, wonder what a hacker could really get from a hack of even a local election computer. [The answer, known for years is: Even amateurs could change the result printed by the scanner. One method is the widely know Hursti Hack. UConn has articulated others. We are left to wonder why NBC did not interview anyone with expertise to answer the registrars questions, to satisfy that wonder. ]
“They would get, you know, name, address, phone number, DMV information such as license number, which is already made available if someone wanted to come in through Freedom of Information,” said Stevenson, the Democratic Registrar of Voters. [I doubt Driver ID is FOIable. If it is, we have problems for voter registration and other reasons. Once again, NBC could/should have asked experts.]

Even the machines used to digitally tabulate election results aren’t connected to the internet in cities and towns.
Melissa Russell, a Bethlehem Registrar of Voters, with the Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut reiterated the point that physical record keeping in Connecticut places the state at an advantage. [Not having voting systems connected to the Internet is definitely an advantage. Yet, not so much against local insider attacks, especially when local officials and their leaders are so confident (overconfident?)]
We also have the advantage of a paper ballot system, where we can look at every vote cast in the case of any discrepancy to make sure our elections equipment has performed accurately. [They CAN. Candidates and the public cannot. The record of officials in looking carefully during post-election audits is quite questionable <See the Citizen Audit Reports> ]
Becker, the GOP registrar in Manchester, explained how state law mandates that each town keep individual paper records for voters, meaning altering results or hacking, would be a tall task.
“They would have to destroy the fire proof cabinets in 169 cities and towns to actually mess with our voter list.” [As we said before, they could alter the CVRS records and the paper records used at the polls would be wrong. The registrar’s office usually uses the online system first, so they would have to be concerned in a particular case to check the paper voter registration record. If there was a mass attack it would disrupt the whole election day to have each polling place call the registrars office to check the paper for each voter. Once again, an insider attack on those paper records would be relatively simple.]
Published at 10:26 PM EDT on Aug 29, 2016
Source: CT Election Officials Say a Hack Nearly Pointless | NBC Connecticut
http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/CT-Election-Officials-Say-a-Hack-Nearly-Pointless391684361.html#ixzz4Ipw9JbFD
Follow us: @nbcconnecticut on Twitter | NBCConnecticut on Facebook

Is our election hackable or not?

We hear from Richard Clarke, President Obama, Pam Smith, and Secretary of the State Denise Merrill. We annotate Denise Merrill’s recent press conference.

Richard Clark, former White House senior cybersecurity policy adviser via ABC News: Yes, It’s Possible to Hack the Election <read>

Those experiences confirm my belief that if sophisticated hackers want to get into any computer or electronic device, even one that is not connected to the internet, they can do so. The U.S., according to media reports, hacked in to the Iranian nuclear centrifuge control system even though the entire system was air-gapped from the internet. The Russians, according to authoritative accounts, hacked into the Pentagon’s SIPRNet, a secret-level system separate from the internet. North Koreans, computer forensics experts have told me, penetrated SWIFT, the international banking exchange system. Iranians allegedly wiped clean all software on over 30,000 devices in the Aramco oil company. The White House, the State Department and your local fast food joint have all been hacked. Need I go on?…

Some systems produce a paper ballot of record, but that paper is kept only for a recount; votes are recorded by a machine such as an optical scanner and then stored as electronic digits. The counting of the paper ballots of record — when there are such things — is exceedingly rare and is almost never done for verification in the absence of a recount demand.

President Obama via NPR: President Obama: The Election Will Not Be ‘Rigged’ <read>

“Of course the election will not be rigged! What does that mean?” Obama said at a news conference at the Pentagon. “That’s ridiculous. That doesn’t make any sense.”

The president added Americans should not take Trump’s musings on this seriously. “We do take seriously, as we always do,” the president said, “our responsibilities to monitor and preserve the integrity of the voting process.”

Pam Smith, Verified Voting via NPR: Hacking An Election: Why It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You Might Think <read>

“Wherever there’s a fully electronic voting system, there’s potential for tampering of some kind,” said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting. She says her nonprofit group has been warning about such tampering for years.

Smith says the Democratic Party hacks are another red flag that someone might try to interfere with election results, and that there are many ways to do that.

“If you can get at an election management system, you could potentially alter results, or muddy up the results, or you could even just shed doubt on the outcome because you make it clear that there’s been tampering,” she says.

Denise Merrill, Connecticut Secretary of the State and President of the National Association of Secretaries of State, press conference as reported by CTNewsJunkie: Merrill Defends Integrity of Connecticut’s Voting System <read> With our annotations in [brackets]

I think it’s highly improbable at best that a national system of elections could be hacked. First of all there is no national system of elections,” Merrill, who is president of the National Association of Secretaries of State said Wednesday. “Our election system is extremely decentralized.” [This is a strawman. It does not take a national hack. In a close election hacking just one or two swing states could do the job. In fact, just a couple of polling places the winner of the Electoral College could have been changed either way in Florida alone. A single state could have made the difference in 2004 and 1960. ]

She said there is no credible cyber security threat. [This is just plain false in the light of all the know hacks of government, election, and corporate hacks. Perhaps it is taken out of context.]

In Connecticut there is no county government, so there are 169 towns who are all in charge of running the election and none of them are connected to the Internet. [All of them are connected to the Internet. Especially to the Central Voter Registration System, critical on election day for 5% to 10% of the vote. Also for the new end of day Election Night Reporting System. I applaud the Secretary for continuing to follow the recommendations of UConn implemented by the Bysiewicz administration to keep the voting machines from the Internet. Unfortunately that does not guarantee security. a) See the Stuxnet attack, it attacked Iran’s nuclear centrifuges which were isolated from the Internet. b) It is easy for single insider to hack the voting machines in a single town. Sadly, officials in each of 169 towns cannot approach the levels of security of Military, Government, or Corporate installations, all of which have been hacked by insiders and outsiders.]

“The idea that somehow there could be some national system hack is very unlikely,” Merrill said. [I agree, yet it is a strawman argument]

She said different states are using different kinds of election equipment, but Connecticut is using optical scan machines, which are not connected to the Internet.

Alexander Schwarzmann, head of the University of Connecticut’s Voter Technology Research Center, said there is no possible way to connect the optical scan voting machines to the Internet.

He said Connecticut’s optical scan machines also rely on a paper ballot so those can be counted independently of technology. [As we have said many times, it depends on who wants to look. Go to your town hall and ask to see and count the ballots.]

Merrill said there’s been a lot of pressure on the state to go to some type of Internet voting, but she has resisted. The state purchased the optical scan machines about 10 years ago and have developed an auditing process for the memory cards that are inserted into the machines…[As we have told the Secretary and others several times, defending against Internet voting has been her finest hour!]

Peggy Reeves, director of elections, said most of the mistakes made in elections can be attributed to “human error.” [Unfortunately, too often the SOTS Office and registrars assume that any differences in a post-election audit, without investigation, actually are human error in machine counts. Sometimes the scanners have counted incorrectly in Connecticut, sometimes local official pursue the problem and determine it was not human error in the hand count, but human error in the election process that lead to an incorrect count being certified for the election. Hacking, fraud, machine error, or errors in the process all must be investigated, resolved, and prevented in the future. ]

Merrill said she wanted to sit down with the media Wednesday to “reassure the voters” that Connecticut’s voting system is secure. [Overconfidence is a standard concern of security professionals as an indicator of security risk.]

As far as fraud is concerned, Merrill said the concern in Connecticut is whether people are appropriately filing absentee ballots. She said the law says a person must be absent from the state or unable to get to the polls from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. [We agree absentee voting fraud should be a concern. That is why we warn against all -mail voting, and no-excuse absentee voting.]

Also a Courant article covering the same press conference: <read>

…during a demonstration in Merrill’s office, Peggy Reeves, the state director of elections, showed how the machine is locked with a tamper-proof seal. The UConn Center for Voting Technology Research tests the memory cards the machines use before and after each election.

As we said in our comment on the article:

To be clear CT does not use “Tamper Proof” anything tape or seals. They are called “Tamper Evident”. What that means is that if officials follow good seal protocols and the seals are actually “tamper evident” as applied then officials should be able to detect if they have been tampered with.

Connecticut does not have, as far as I know, any such protocols. Many apply the seals in ways that could easily be compromised. NJ tried six times to create effective seal protocols and failed each time. Finally, seals are designed to prevent outsiders from tampering without detection by insiders. It would be much more difficult for seals to protect against insider access.

Also the Secretary of the State on Where We Live: <Listen>

We called in and discussed the Election Performance Index, areas it does not cover, and the cyber risks to our Election Day Registration System. The Secretary stated that we “Audit all voting machines”. That is incorrect. We audit 5% of polling place voting machines (until July 1st we audited 10%), never audit central count absentee ballot systems, and the audit, as conducted, is insufficient to provide the credibility Connecticut voters deserve. <See the observation reports at the Citizen Audit>