Jason Kitcat

Quebec City, where the report was announced

Almost exactly a year ago, I reported on the problems and uncertain results of the Quebec municipal elections. Problems included 45,000 votes being counted twice and results having to be modified in some districts and changing the winner of one contest. It was a slow, messy and controversial mess with the losing candidate for Montreal mayor calling for the results to be cancelled.

Michel Monette of e-democracy blog techmocratie.org emailed me to let me know about what has happened since (Thanks Michel!).

Quebec’s chief electoral officer, Marcel Blanchet, has delivered a scathing report on the election with the result that an e-voting moratorium will remain in place indefinitely. Blanchet said that the systems “[do] not offer sufficient guarantees of transparency and security to ensure the integrity of the vote” and he could not be sure that the 2005 election results were accurate. His report found that:

• Electronic voting cost as much as 25% more than ‘regular voting’
• Machines misread ballots
• The lack of paper ballots prevented judicial recounts
• Poor management of voting systems (especially lack of security measures) left considerable room for errors, accidents and the absence or insufficiency of solutions in case of problems
• Absence of technical specifications, norms and standards that would have guaranteed the quality and the security of the voting systems used
• Machines were only partially tested in places
• Election personnel were not adequately trained
• There were no independent experts on electronic voting to whom returning officers could turn

These findings are important and relevant to all countries looking at electronic voting.

The Chief Electoral Officer also set out strict guidelines for use if e-voting were ever to return. These guidelines included mandating that all source code should be made available to ‘competent authorities’. He also slipped in the ruling out of using all-postal or even widespread postal ballots in Quebec.

So, for now, e-voting has been stopped in Quebec. Are the lessons starting to be learnt?

Sources:

• The Gazette

• Elections Quebec Press Release:
  Evaluation Report of the New Methods of Voting 1

• Elections Quebec Press Release:
  Evaluation Report of the New Methods of Voting 2

• How to steal an election by hacking the vote
  Ars Tecnica have published an excellent, very approachable introductory guide to the massive flaws with DRE type e-voting machines. Includes illustrations and a solid set of links for further reading. (Thank you to John Hornbaker for bringing this to my attention)

• Avi Rubin's blog
  This is an overdue link, Dr Avi Rubin's blog is full of good sense, as would be expected.

• A Brief Illustrated History of Voting
  It's brief, and it's illustrated. The ever-wise Doug Jones has written this wonderful short history of voting's evolution from clay shards to e-voting.

I recently linked to a video called 'Votergate', a rather good 35 minute piece on the huge problems with e-voting in the US. You can watch Votergate now, but it's just a small tease compared to what the filmmakers have now produced after three and a half years of work.

'Hacking Democracy' is an 80 minute documentary film which completely lifts the lid on the corruption, fraud and ignorance surrounding e-voting in the US. Included in the film is an on-camera successful exploit of a certified e-voting machine. While for those who have followed the US developments in details, there may be few surprises, for most viewers the impact of seeing this stuff on film is going to be huge.

This film has good pedigree, one of the co-directors has produced items on e-voting for Channel 4 news and the film includes interviews with respected experts such as Avi Rubin and David Dill. Nevertheless the core of the story, without a doubt, is Bev Harris' extraordinary activism and while I haven't seen the entire film yet, I think this approach is going to humanise this technical issue very effectively.

HBO have picked up the film and will be showing on their channel before the November 7th elections in the US, a hugely political move. The film will also be shown at the Sheffield Documentary Festival.

Where to see it

USA – HBO November 2nd, 9pm (link includes more about the film)

UK – Sheffield Documentary Festival (link also includes more about the film)
31st Oct 20.30 & 4th Nov 9.30 (co-directors Russ Michaels and Simon Ardizzone will attend this second screening)

We are working on a London screening…

UPDATE: London screening will be 6th Feb 07

If you don't already know it, Presentation Zen is an astonishingly high-quality blog with consistently excellent posts. Today's post on Bill Clinton's gift for communicating includes a wonderful quote from a recent speech he delivered at Georgetown University:

“The problem with ideology is if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up, you know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results.” (see clip on YouTube)

This gem from Clinton beautifully sums up how I feel about much of the debate surrounding e-voting. The evidence keeps pouring in from all over the world that the risks and problems with e-voting are far greater than any potential benefits, yet governments keep pushing on with 'convenient' electronic voting systems.

In his speech Clinton actually presented the alternative prior to the quote I've used above:

“We believe in a politics…dominated by evidence and argument. There is a big difference between a philosophy and an ideology on the right or the left. If you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another. But like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning. And you are certainly open to debate the practical applications of your philosophy.”

My basic philosophy is that information and communications technologies are powerful tools for making the world a better place for all. Projects like MySociety, WorldChanging, MoveOn and Viridian Design all show some of the possibilities for doing good with ICTs. It was with this philosophy that I first began developing the GNU.FREE open source e-voting system. But the evidence came in, I learnt from the development process and I debated with others. I came to understand that the challenges e-voting presents our democracies are in no way justified by the minimal claimed benefits for the technologies. I changed my mind.

But with appalling news that Prime Minister Tony Blair wants the national DNA database to include every citizen, what hope is there for changing minds in government?

There are two points in government on which pressure can be applied, the Department of Constitutional Affairs who are running the pilot programme, and local authorities who will apply for and administer individual pilots. The Department is a single target, but quite well fortified, shall we say. But for local authorities the pilots are voluntary so getting them to rule themselves out is quite possible.

The first success is Brighton & Hove City Council. Thanks to the Green Party councillors, the council's Chief Executive Alan McCarthy has ruled the city out of running pilots in 2007.

Please contact your local councillors asking them to ensure your council doesn't apply to run a pilot in 2007. It's fast, easy and effective with WriteToThem:

function clearDefault(el) { if (el.defaultValue==el.value) el.value = “”; } function fillDefault(el) { if (el.value==””) el.value = “Your Postcode”; }

• Votergate: A documentary video on electronic voting problems in the USA – a rather good 35 minute piece including interviews with Avi Rubin, Howard Dean, David Dill, Bev Harris, Diebold's marketing director (who deservers an Oscar for keeping a straight face) and many more.

• Election Commission of India information film on their Electronic Voting Machine – the animate machine/person is more than a little weird for my liking, but interesting to see how their machine is setup.

I've had the time to give the May 2007 Electoral Pilots prospectus a more thorough look. There's some good, such as very sensible thoughts on e-counting, some intriguing and some which is erm, less good.

A main external factor driving electoral modernisation is stated to be:

The context of the Government's corresponding drive towards the electronic delivery of services in an era where it is increasingly common for an ever-wider array of transactions to be completed remotely either online or by phone. Indeed there may be an expectation by younger voters who have grown up in the Internet age that voting should also be available this way.

I recently completed a project which involved interviewing members of a local authority's youth council. While we discussed the Internet and elections in detail, not one of them raised the idea of electronic voting. I think that actually quite a few look forward to the idea of walking to a polling station, nodding to the Bobby on duty and marking their ballot paper for the first time.

On procurement:

To facilitate the development and adoption of robust e-voting services, as Government has done previously, the DCA is co-ordinating the procurement of e-voting and e-counting services. This procurement exercise will establish a framework consisting of a number of companies or consortia capable of delivering solutions to support piloting over the next four years.

Four more years of e-voting? I'm guessing the government is finding it difficult to sign up suppliers without a commitment to at least four years of pilots. I think many of the suppliers lost quite a bit of money on the previous pilots and are a bit wary, to say the least.

e-voting may have a positive environmental impact by reducing the need for paper. There are however other factors that need to be considered to identify whether there is an overall benefit in this regard

puh-lease

Some of the factors that will be used when considering whether to approve a pilot are really quite good. The Secretary of State needs to be satisfied that: * there is learning value to be gained from conducting the pilot and there is a clear means of testing the impact of the innovation – including the implications for security and potential fraud; * the pilot will maintain public confidence in the electoral process and that key risks have been identified and managed; * any innovation is as secure, if not more secure than, conventional electoral practices: * any innovation is robust and attracts public confidence:

It will be very interesting to see if and how the pilots meet these goals. None of the e-voting pilots previously have, in my opinion, been as secure as conventional elections held in the UK.

One suggested e-voting pilot idea is:

• [a] system may be used to link to the elector to candidate information to ensure they have the opportunity to update themselves on candidates and policies at the time of voting;

Which is very interesting. I don't think it's going to be easy to provide this within a secure e-voting environment. However this kind of online candidate information is exactly what I'll be chairing a discussion of at a session for e-democracy '06.

Overall I do think the prospectus is fairly well written, I just question this policy of continually piloting e-voting when there are so many other potential improvements to our electoral system to try.

The “We do not trust voting computers” foundation in The Netherlands have performed a quite superb security analysis of the Nedap voting machines used there.

They lucked into getting their hands on first one then two more voting machines, a major breakthrough of their own. Starting work on August 23rd, 2006 they managed to find and publish numberous flaws by October 6th, 2006. Incredible work but also testament to how poor these systems are.

In a lovely tale of international unintended consequences, the findings of the Irish Independent Commission on Electronic Voting provided a head-start for the researchers as Ireland also has Nedap machines.

A quick summary of the flaws found:

• Physical locks on the machines use the same key for all 8,000 machines in The Netherlands. The key for the locks is readily available for purchase at one Euro each, there is only one key made to fit this model lock.

• A supposedly restricted maintenance mode has its password hard-coded as the Dutch word for 'secret'.

• To demonstrate that the machines are just computers built from standardised components and that they had fully understood the workings, they reprogrammed a machine to play chess.

• A program “Nedap PowerFraud” was developed to electronically stuff the ballot memory of a Nedap machine, but only in real elections and not test situations.

• TEMPEST or Van Eck phreaking, that is eavesdropping radio signals from the Nedap machines presents convincing opportunities for knowing how users have voted.

It's very interesting that despite all these attacks and a few others mentioned in the report, the Nedap machines actually meet all Dutch regulatory requirements. Of course there is nothing stopping the supplier exceeding those requirements (not likely, I know) but in many senses this report is a devastating critique not of the technology but of the specifications and regulations provided by the Dutch authorities.

You can watch an Irish news report about all this here [Real]

• Full security analysis report [PDF]
• Detailed pictures of the machines used
• Links to oodles of technical data
• English language press coverage of these findings
• Blog entry with some background on the chess!
• Blog entry with more details on the rubbish lock/key used
• YouTube videos of some of the attacks (in Dutch)

Many thanks to Anne-Marie Oostveen for letting me know about this early, but being snowed under this hasn't emerged on here until after it go Slashdotted!

A quick round-up of coverage on the 2007 e-voting pilots announcement.

• The Register with a short but sweet jab at the muddled logic of the announcement.
• Silicon.com report it pretty straight.
• A linux sysadmin, tory blogs his criticisms
• Somebody a Warwick university doubts councils are the right people to be running these pilots

In other news, I'm afraid it looks like Ireland are going try to use their e-voting machines again:

• Ahern makes case for e-voting
• E-voting machines to be used in 2009 despite warnings

The Times reports today that the UK will be investigated by the Council of Europe for electoral fraud and alleged breaches of human rights. The announcement currently relates specifically to postal vote related fraud particularly the aftermath of the infamous Birmingham postal vote fraud case which caused Labour serious embarrassment and lead to outspoken comments from presiding Judge Richard Mawrey:

“Anybody who has sat through the case I have just tried and listened to evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find [government assurances about postal voting] surprising” (Source: BBC)

Postal voting is extremely problematic, particularly when an election is all-postal. However electronic voting creates the opportunities for fraud on a much wider scale whilst being considerably harder to detect. Additionally remote electronic voting continues to breach human rights treaties demanding a secret ballot. So, given yesterday's announcement of pilots in 2007, I hope this investigation is widened to include electronic voting.

(Thanks to Ian Brown for the tip-off)