CSC 379:Week 5, Group 2

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Certification Processes for E-Voting Systems

Study Guide

Hidden Standards / Certification tests / Poor Accountability

E-voting is a very tricky issue. Large programs are such difficult things to understand and fully verify that many times the only person that fully knows what a program does is the person, or people who wrote it. For this reason the E-voting systems should be under much stricter review and testing than normal voting. However right now there are not strict enough tests for these machines and there are not set in stone standards that every e-voting machine must live up to.

California currently has the best review system for voting in the United States. They have a "red" team of testers that try and disturb the voting process. They try to manipulate the voting count. The source code for the e-voting machines is also under review. This is a much more aggressive stance towards holding the companies that make e-voting systems accountable.

Researchers went through the code that controls e-voting machines in Ohio made by Diebold Elections Systems. They reported that there were flaws in the system that would allow one person to cast many electronic votes. Issues like this need to be discovered early and are the primary reason that e-voting systems should be more thoroughly tested by any and all states that use them. There should be a publicly viewable federal standard for e-voting that should be enforced in all the states. This would make it so that no state officials or business people could simply look the other way. For a state's e-voting systems to really be trustworthy, there needs to be some other entity holding that state accountable for its e-voting machines.

Vested Interest

One of the problems about the voting machine certification process is that so few people are actually involved in the process. The small number of people allows for a vested interest among a number of them to have a large sway, making the certification process less than objective. Vested interest could allow for problems to be ignored so that voting systems can be certified. Obviously, such a bias is unethical and could compromise the certification process causing it to be a poor measure of the voting software's reliability.

There are two groups of people involved in the certification process and thus two possible vested interests to consider: those of the company producing the voting machine and those of the company testing the voting machine. The company producing the voting machine obviously have vested interest towards their product being certified. In fact, in most cases, they can only make sales if their products are certified. Therefore, the entire revenue procured by voting systems depends on certification. Also, in most cases, if the product isn't certified, the company would have to wait an entire year before they would have the possibility again.

The organization that actually certifies products also has vested interest. This is mainly because this organization is a company given the ability by the government to certify voting machines. Since it is a company, the employees typically care very much whether their company is making money. The money it makes is paid by the company producing the voting machine and not the government. This is prime concern for a conflict of interest. Also, the movement to modernize voting in the United States can only become larger if machines are actually certified and used in elections. The growth of this movement is important to companies certifying voting machines because it means more potential market for them.


Whistleblowing

Since the software used for voting machines is proprietary, very few people have the chance to discover or check for flaws. At the same time, most of these people work for the company that produced the voting machine and therefore have vested interest in the certification of the voting machines. This extremely private process depends on whistleblowers to point out flaws not found in the certification process. Unfortunately, most such whistleblowers have met the same sad fates as others in the software industry; they have been fired, demoted, and/or challenged in court. Since the requirement for voting software is merely that it be certified, when a whistleblower publicly notifies that the software has been wrongly certified, it is typically used in an election before the whistleblower's claims are verified.

In the case of Diebold's voting software, Stephen Heller blew the whistle on uncertified software present in a voting system to be used in an election. The software was used in the election anyway and Heller now faces possible prison time. In the case of VoteHere's voting software, Dan Spillane, a software tester employed at VoteHere allegedly planned to raise unsolved issues with the voting software in a meeting with state certifiers. He was fired before the meeting took place and the software was certified.

Table of Contents

  1. What is Electronic voting? An Overview of the Possibilities and Procedures
  2. The Existing System and an Impetus for a Change in the Way We Vote
  3. Dangers Associated with Electronic voting
  4. Legal Issues
  5. Planning for the Future - The Proponents View
  6. Related Sites (Electronic voting providers)

Prompt

Recently there have been many concerns about the certification processes for e-voting systems such as the inability to determine methods used during the certification process and what parts of the e-voting system were not adequately tested. Examine concerns surrounding the certification processes and their ethical implications. Provide links to groups that have investigated the problems you cite and if possible, responses made by the manufacturer/provider of the e-voting system and/or voting district(s) that use the system.

Briefly discuss how individuals and groups have participated in whistleblowing on this topic (methods used, actions taken).

Related External Links

Related Class Website Links

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