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:

Security Assessment of the Diebold Optical Scan Voting Terminal

We present an independent security evaluation of the AccuVote Optical Scan voting terminal (AV-OS). We identify a number of new vulnerabilities of this system which, if exploited maliciously, can invalidate the results of an election process utilizing the terminal. Furthermore, based on our findings an AV-OS can be compromised with off-the-shelf equipment in a matter of minutes even if the machine has its removable memory card sealed in place. The basic attack can be applied to effect a variety of results, including entirely neutralizing one candidate so that their votes are not counted, swapping the votes of two candidates, or biasing the results by shifting some votes from one candidate to another. Such vote tabulation corruptions can lay dormant until the election day, thus avoiding detection through pre-election tests.

Based on these findings, we describe new safe-use recommendations for the AV-OS terminal. Specifically, we recommend installation of tamper-resistant seals for (i) removable memory cards, (ii) serial port, (iii) telephone jacks, as well as (iv) screws that allow access into the terminal’s interior; failure to seal any single one of these components renders the terminal susceptible to the attack outlined above. An alternative is to seal the entire Optical Scan system (sans ballot box) into a tamper-resistant container at all times other than preparation for election and deployment in an election. An unbroken chain of custody must be enforced at all times. Post-election audits are also strongly advised.
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