Voting Machines: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Cara Monical, Centre College ‘13

Brown Fellow Project Exploration:

Last summer: 6 weeks in Spain where I first discovered my passion for computer security and gained a more international outlook

This summer: 8 weeks in South Carolina doing research in analyzing voting machines

Next summer (intended): internship with NSA or FBI Partnership: working with election officials to improve the

system Academic/Research Leadership: wanted to gain research

experience in a larger environment

Importance of Elections Results of elections have a

major impact on the people, the country, and the world

The government’s right to rule is based on the people’s faith in the electoral process

General Chaos

The Good The blind community is able to vote independently for

the first time Voting machines often make running an election easier

for the poll workers, who are often volunteers well past retirement age with very little training

Tabulating results is almost instantaneous The public, in general, prefers voting machines to past

mechanisms for voting

The Bad Current voting technology

is fundamentally insecure and flawed

No meaningful audit trail for verifying results

Elections are so close that machine malfunctions could change the result of the election

PEB

PDA

iVotronic

The Ugly

The already bad system is made worse by preventable human errors

Votes counted without data support

Votes in the data support but not counted

Incorrect timestamps

Analyzing the Current System Worked on iVotronics made by ES&S Produce an event log that records iVotronic ID, PEB ID,

PEB type, date, time, event code, and event message for each event

Try to find ways to improve from election to election with the current system

Methodology

Parse event logCount events for each iVotronic,

PEB

Look for consistent patterns

Check for procedural

irregularities

Check abnormal events

Compare results between counties

Normal event logTime Event07:29:44 0001510 Vote cast by voter07:41:02 0001510 Vote cast by voter07:47:28 0001510 Vote cast by voter07:49:16 0001510 Vote cast by voter07:54:34 0001510 Vote cast by voter08:00:13 0001510 Vote cast by voter

Partial event log for iVotronic 5122975, used in Lexington County, with all events from 7:35 am to 8 am on November 2, 2011

Problematic Event LogTime Event07:31:56 0001510 Vote cast by voter07:32:03 0002400 PEB access failed07:32:03 0002400 PEB access failed07:32:15 0002400 PEB access failed07:32:15 0000706 Failed to retrieve EQC from PEB07:32:15 0001635 Terminal shutdown - IPS exit07:35:30 0001510 Vote cast by voter07:39:44 0001510 Vote cast by voter07:39:51 0002400 PEB access failed07:39:51 0002400 PEB access failed07:40:03 0002400 PEB access failed07:40:03 0000706 Failed to retrieve EQC from PEB

Partial event log for iVotronic 5101203, used in Lexington County, with all events from 7:35 am to 7:40 am on November 2, 2011

Types of Results Identified…

Specific iVotronics and PEBs likely to have a problem Lapses in election procedure Differences between counties Differences between elections

Found evidence of poor programming practices in the software behind the event logs

Found some evidence of hardware failures

Hardware Problems Sumter, general election, iVotronic 5137877

11/02/2010 14:25:43 0002504 CF - file read error11/02/2010 14:25:43 0002513 File - Read or write error11/02/2010 14:59:12 0002207 TF - chip vs chip crc error11/02/2010 14:25:46 0002184 UNKNOWN11/02/2010 14:25:46 0002449 UNKNOWN

11/02/2010 14:25:12 0001204 Terminal vote image is corrupted…

11/02/2010 14:57:20 0002504 CF - file read error 11/02/2010 14:57:20 0002513 File - Read or write error 11/02/2010 19:17:27 0002207 TF - chip vs chip crc error 11/02/2010 19:17:27 0002207 TF - chip vs chip crc error

…..

11/03/2010 11:23:00 0001404 Warning - no valid term audit data

Programming Problems UNKNOWN event codes Prints the hardware error messages for hours, pages of

events The event “vote cancelled– printer problem” appears

despite the lack of printers “Terminal shutdown” in some instances could be sleep

mode, in others– definitely not The standard PEB access fail sequence is illogical

Future Work I hope to perform similar analysis on the iVotronics used

in some counties in Kentucky I also plan to analyze the data from the upcoming South

Carolina Republican primary The completed analysis will be submitted for the USENIX

conference and to a computer science journal

Acknowledgements Dr. Buell Dean Crepes and Carolyn Bledsoe of the Lexington

County Election Commission Mrs. Laura Boccanfuso, Dr. Eastman, and Dr. Bowles National Science Foundation University of South Carolina The Brown Foundation and Centre College

Questions or More Information

For more information about my research, my project, or the voting machine situation, please contact me at

cara.monical@centre.edu