Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Dr. Matt Blaze, Computer Security Expert with the Name of a Superhero! This Week on CVI's Voice of the Voters

The California study was, as far as I know, the most comprehensive independent security evaluation of electronic voting technologies ever conducted, covering products from three major vendors and investigating not only the voting machines themselves, but also the back-end systems that create ballots and tally votes.  I believe our reports now constitute the most detailed published information available about how these systems work and the specific risks entailed by their use in elections.

That's a quote from Dr. Matt Blaze, who for two months led one of the source code analysis teams in California's security review of its electronic voting systems.   Here's more from Dr. Blaze:

We found significant,  deeply-rooted security weaknesses in all three vendors' software. Our newly-released source code analyses address many of the supposed shortcomings of the red team studies, which have been (quite unfairly, I think) criticized as being "unrealistic".  It should now be clear that the red teams were successful not because they somehow "cheated," but rather because the built-in security mechanisms they were up against simply don't work properly. Reliably protecting these systems under operational conditions will likely be very hard.

The problems we found in the code were far more pervasive, and much more easily exploitable, than I had ever imagined they would be.

Tonight on Voice of the Voters, the Coalition for Voting Integrity's Internet radio show, Dr. Blaze will share his knowledge, experience and insights in a discussion of why, exactly, our vote is not safe in the hands of unverifiable and insecure voting machines and the corporations who sell them. 

Bonus:  It turns out that Dr. Blaze isn't only a computer genius, he has a sense of humor.  To be completely prepared for tomorrow's show and for some fun, download a Security Problem Excuse Bingo card, created by Dr. Blaze and  Jutta Degener.     Bucks County voters have heard most of those excuses before. 

Then, Democratic presidential candidate, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, will explain why he thinks DREs are a problem, what he thinks can be done in Congress to protect American voters from systems that are flawed beyond repair and how we can secure American elections systems in time for 2008. He'll also discuss other key issues facing the country in this historic time.

Congress is dropping the ball on this issue, offering us crummy bills that cater to the whims of electronic voting machine vendors.   It will be interesting to hear what Congressman Kucinich thinks his colleagues can do in time for 2008.

How to listen to Voice of the Voters:

Voice of the Voters airs every Wednesday night at 8:00 PM ET on 1360 AM and on the Internet. (http://wnjc.duxpond.com/)

Note: If you use dial up internet, it is best to turn off all other programs in order to receive clearest broadcast.

Voice of the Voters is also available as a podcast at iTunes.com under "Voice of the Voters" in the News & Politics category.

Archived shows are available here.

Full disclosure: I'm a proud member of CVI.

Comments

[lani brown]

The problem isn’t that California and Florida studies reveal flaws with the voting machines. The problem is that they didn’t find them before the machines were purchased. Today on NPR, FL Secretary of State Kurt Browning drilled to the heart of this problem when he asked if the amount of time spent in defending the voting system or trying to prove to the public that it’s accurate and secure is worth the effort, when we should be spending our time running good elections.

All that time Browning’s spending now proving and testing should have occurred well before the voting machines were installed. Standard business quality assurance. We’re not picking out speak-and-spell toys at the local toy store. We’re running a country.

If we are to secure one voter, one vote…every-time integrity in our election process, we must think more like corporate America. Until we implement high-bar stringent guidelines for voting machine providers and elections officials to uphold, until we fix our election laws to protect us from machine and human error, and human interpretation our election process will continue to be broken.

Lani Massey Brown
A MARGIN OF ERROR: BALLOTS OF STRAW, a novel

[eRobin]

Hi :)

You're right - HAVA was pushed through in an hysterical rush to do something about Florida in 2000. The vendors were happy to sell all their unsecure and unverifiable machines to dozens of states claiming - incorrectly - that HAVA forced the states to do so. That time period was absolutely where the problem started and where American citizens dropped the ball.

As for thinking more like corporate America, I don't know. I know that we need to get corporations out of the voting process and return to voter-marked paper ballots that are the official measure of the election. DREs are not able to be made secure - that's a fact. Any stringent standards of the sort that corporate America would employ are a mirage.

[mick arran]

She makes a good point but for the wrong reason:

We need to learn how to think like corporate America so we'll understand the ways they try to screw us, from producing shoddy products to buying favorable laws. If we understood the distinct possibility that evoting machines were likely to be either deeply flawed or rigged to produce a particular corporate-friendly result, we'd have checked them before we bought them. The problem is that we tend to assume - on the basis of nothing more than faith - that the machines will work the way they're supposed to.

Very naive.