LIBERADIO(!)

One of our astute readers let us know that Computer Science professor Hovav Shacham was talking about electronic voting machines on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. The professor studied and tested a machine – not the source code – and found it to be vulnerable to attack and manipulation. And when asked what kind of machine he would use to run a trustworthy election, the computer scientist said, “paper.”

Listen to the segment:

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“What we found is that an attacker who has brief physical access to a machine the night before an election, for example, when it’s left unattended outside a polling place is able to manipulate the machine in such a way that he can induce it to misbehave the net day on election day and appear to run the election faithfully but then shift votes at the end of the day from one candidate to another. And in this way the finding dovetail with those that previous studies have found for other voting machines and in fact of other studies of the same voting machine but along the way we had a couple of different features to..what we found have larger implications for voting security…what it says is that writing software and designing systems is hard and software has bugs – and that’s not altogether surprising the software that we use everyday has bugs. And, perhaps, what it says more is that relying on either having software or systems that are perfect and never make mistakes, or on having the system make mistakes only in ways that hackers would not be smart enough to be able to find, for example by stealing and analyzing a machine, is not a good way to build trust in an election…so I think what we need, we need some system whereby the voters can see an independent record of their vote so that they can check that what is recorded is the way that they intended their vote to be cast. And right now, the best way we know how to do that is with paper.”

The professor also suggests that the paper ballot becomes the ballot of record and that audits be done to make sure the paper ballot count matches the machine count.

We could have the kind of secure election the professor suggests with paper, paper ballots as ballot of record, and random audits because that’s what the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act mandates. You know what’s standing in our way? This guy.