Electronic Voting Machines

Experts warn e-voting systems decades away from security

-By Iain Thomson

March 1, 2012- Security experts have warned that electronic voting systems are decades away from being secure, and to prove it a team from the University of Michigan successfully got the foul-mouthed, drunken Futurama robot Bender elected to head of a school board.

In 2010 the Washington DC election board announced it had set up an e-voting system for absentee ballots and was planning to use it in an election. However, to test the system, it invited the security community and members of the public to try and hack it three weeks before the election.

"It was too good an opportunity to pass up," explained Professor Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan. "How often do you get the chance to hack a government network without the possibility of going to jail?"

… Read More

-By Kevin Lee

March 2, 2012- Electronic voting has earned a pretty bad reputation for being insecure and completely unreliable. Well, get ready to add another entry to e-voting's list of woes.

One Bender Bending Rodríguez was elected to the 2010 school board in Washington DC. A team of hackers from the University of Michigan got Bender elected as a write-in candidate who stole every vote from the real candidates. Bender, of course, is a cartoon character from the TV series Futurama.

… Read More

-by Michael McIntee

February 19, 2012- Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is advocating a more secure voting system that potentially could please both sides of the voter photo ID debate.

Republicans want to require Minnesotans to present a photo ID at the polls before they can vote.

Democratic Farmer Laborites say that would discourage people who don’t have a photo ID from voting — many of whom are poor, elderly and/or disabled.

Electronic poll books provide the photo identification of voters that Republicans seek without putting the onus of getting a photo ID on the voters as DFLers despise. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie sees it as a possible bipartisan solution to the issue.

Minnesota made and more secure and less costly than voter photo ID proposal.

… Read More

Battle for independent election investigation rages in rural Republican county, pitting renegade Election Board against County Commission, giant E-Vote firm ES&S…

-By Brad Freidman

December 12, 2012- According to the Initial Report from a landmark independent forensic audit of the Venango County, PA, touch-screen voting system — the same system used in dozens of counties across the state and country — someone used a computer that was not a part of county's election network to remotely access the central election tabulator computer, illegally, "on multiple occasions." Despite the disturbing report, as obtained by The BRAD BLOG and posted in full below, we may never get to learn who did it or why, if Venango's County Commissioners, a local judge, and the nation's largest e-voting company have their way. And that's not all we won't get to find out about.

… Read More

Election gizmos had many residents overvoting, or picking two candidates for one office

-By Reuven Blau

December 5, 2011- Some 60,000 votes in last year’s elections in New York were tossed out because voters accidentally voted for two candidates, a new study has found.

The report, released Monday by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said the mistaken double votes were caused by confusion over the new optical-scan voting system.

The voters got confused and wound up selecting two candidates — mistakes known as “overvotes” that were quietly disqualified, according to the report.

Roughly 20,000 of the 60,000 in over-votes were in the gubernatorial contest.

The old lever-operated machines don’t allow for over-voting, which the study predicted could lead to more than 100,000 scrapped votes next year, when more people show up to the polls to select a president.

… Read More