Electronic Voting Systems Are Vulnerable
FindLawBy Eric Sinrod
In the wake of the hanging and dimpled chads debacle of the 2000 Presidential election, there has been a movement afoot to embrace electronic voting systems. Good news, right? Perhaps not quite yet. The Brennan Center has released a recent report analyzing the security vulnerabilities of three of the most commonly use electronic voting systems, and the results are sobering.
In a nutshell, all three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities which "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections." The most troubling of these vulnerabilities can be "substantially remedied" if adequate countermeasures are put in place at the state and local level. And few jurisdictions have initiated the countermeasures that could "make the least difficult attacks against voting systems much more difficult to execute successfully."
The three electronic voting systems that were analyzed are Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) which directly records a voter’s selections in each contest using a ballot that appears on a display screen, DRE with Voter Verified Paper Trail (DRE w/VVPT) which is a DRE that captures a voter’s choice both internally in electronic form and contemporaneously on paper, and Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) which allows a voter to mark a paper ballot with a pen or pencil with the voter then carrying the ballot to a scanner.
For all three voting systems, when there is a goal to change the result of a close statewide election, software attack programs are not difficult. Furthermore, voting machines that have wireless components are much more open to various attacks. At this point, only New York and Minnesota ban wireless components on all voting machines.
The Brennan Center makes certain security recommendations in its report. For example, there should be automatic routine audits comparing voter verified papers records to electronic records following every election. There also should be "parallel testing" on election day of randomly selected machines to seek to detect software attacks and software bugs. In addition, more states should ban wireless components.
Steps like these should make electronic voting systems more likely to be relied upon, according to The Brennan Center. Plainly, reliability and accuracy are essential in our elections to ensure a fair democracy. Of course, most elections usually are not so close that a few inaccuracies could be outcome determinative. However, once in a while that does happen – witness the 2000 Presidential election that was a statistical dead head, notwithstanding tens of millions of votes. And importantly, it is critical that planned attacks that could affect many votes be prevented.
Eric Sinrod is a partner in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris LLP (http://www.duanemorris.com) where he focuses on litigation matters of various types, including information technology and intellectual property disputes. His Web site is http://www.sinrodlaw.com and he can be reached at ejsinrod@duanemorris.com. To receive a weekly email link to Mr. Sinrod’s columns, please send an email to him with Subscribe in the Subject line.
This column is prepared and published for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s law firm or its individual partners.
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