Statistical Analysis of the Post Election Audit Data 2007 November Elections

The University of Connecticut Voting Technology Research (VoTeR) Center received the data gathered in the post-election audit performed in the State of Connecticut following the November 2007 election. The audits of the randomly selected 10% of the districts were conducted in November and December of 2007, and the returns were conveyed by the Office of the Secretary of the State to the VoTeR Center on January 8, 2008. The audit data received by the Center contains 958 records, where each record represents information about a specific candidate. Specifically, each record contains the following significant information: date, district, machine seal number, office, candidate, machine counted total, undisputed hand counted total, questionable hand counted total, overall hand counted total, that is, the sum of undisputed and questionable ballots. This report contains several statistical analyses of the audit returns and recommendations. Among the 958 records received by the Center, 175 records (18.3%) were incomplete, unusable, or obviously incorrect. Another 111 records (11.6%) contained usable, but incomplete data, or minor arithmetic errors. Thus about 70% of the audit records were complete and contained no obvious errors. While some problematic records were clearly due to human error (e.g., in addition), this suggests that auditors found the audit instructions to be ambiguous or insufficiently specific. Read the rest of this entry »

Partial Post-Election Audit of Memory Cards for the November 2007 Connecticut Elections

The UConn VoTeR Center performed a partial post-election audit of the memory cards for the AccuVote Optical Scan tabulators that were to be used in the November 2007 Connecticut Elections. The cards were programmed by LHS Associates of Methuen, Massachusetts, and shipped to the towns in Connecticut. The research and development required to perform the audit and the methodology and procedures used to conduct the audit are essentially identical to what was used to perform the pre-election memory card audit, and we refer the reader to our earlier report to avoid a complete restatement. Read the rest of this entry »

Pre-Election Audit of Memory Cards for the November 2007 Connecticut Elections

The UConn VoTeR Center performed an audit of the pre-election memory cards for the AccuVote Optical Scan tabulators that were to be used in the November 2007 Connecticut Elections. The cards were programmed by LHS Associates of Methuen, Massachusetts, and shipped to the towns in Connecticut. The towns were instructed to test the cards and to choose randomly one out of each four cards per district to be shipped for the audit.

The total of 522 cards were received and tested by the VoTeR Center, out of which 378 cards were received before the election. Out of the total number of cards, 18 cards, or 3.5% were found to contain “junk” data, that is, they were unreadable, which is easily detected by the tabulators as such, and could not have been used in the election. The rest of the cards, or 96.6%, were found to have been properly programmed for election. These cards contained valid ballot data and the executable code on these cards was the expected code, with no extraneous data or code on the cards.
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ACSAC’07 Paper - Tampering with Special Purpose Trusted Computing Devices: A Case Study in Optical Scan E-Voting

Special purpose trusted computing devices are currently being deployed to offer many services for which the general purpose computing paradigm is unsuitable. The nature of the services offered by many of these devices demand high security and reliability, as well as low cost and low power consumption. Electronic Voting machines is a canonical example of this phenomenon. With electronic voting machines currently being used in much of the United States and several other countries, there is a strong need for thorough security evaluation of these devices and the procedures in place for their use. In this work, we first put forth a general framework for special purpose trusted computing devices. We then focus on Optical Scan (OS) electronic voting technology as a specific instance of this framework. OS terminals are a popular e-voting technology with the decided advantage of a user-verified paper trail: the ballot sheets themselves. Still election results are based on machine generated totals as well as machine-generated audit reports to validate the voting process.

In this paper we present a security assessment of the Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan voting terminal (AV-OS), a popular OS terminal currently in wide deployment anticipating the 2008 Presidential elections. The assessment is developed using exclusively reverse-engineering, without any technical specifications provided by the machine suppliers. We demonstrate a number of security issues that relate to the machine’s proprietary language, called AccuBasic, that is used for reporting election results. While this language is thought to be benign, especially given that it is essentially sandboxed by the firmware to have only read access, we demonstrate that it is powerful enough to (i) strengthen known attacks against the AV-OS so that they become undetectable prior to elections (and thus significantly increasing their magnitude) or, (ii) to conditionally bias the election results to reach a desired outcome. Given the discovered vulnerabilities and attacks we proceed to discuss how random audits can be used to validate with high confidence that a procedure carried out by special purpose devices such as the AV-OS has not been manipulated. We end with a set of recommendations for the design and safe-use of OS voting systems.

The conference paper: ACSAC07-VoTeR-Paper.pdf presented at http://www.acsac.org/

Case Study: Election Partnerships

Electiononline.org has issued a report concerning the various partnerships that are in place to assist election officials. Check the UCONN-partnership-report.pdf

A Summary Comparison of the Optical Scan (OS) and the Touch Screen (TS) Voting Terminals

This summary presents an impartial discussion of the two voting technologies in wide use as of this writing (2007): Optical Scan and Touch Screen technologies. The purpose of the presentation is to better the understanding of the pros and cons offered by these two technologies.

Technical reports: