Opinion: Sequoia & e-voting... the best government money can buy

Comments

Related

Active Comments

dikbo says: "At least with the machines you can tell if there has been a problem." Do a little research into the...

Read the rest | Reply

Anonymous says: Considering the people counting the ballots would probably also not know how to count or write an intelligible sentence, what...

Read the rest | Reply

All Comments (3) | Post New

• Election Day: What could possibly go wrong?
• Q&A: Felten on e-voting and what can go wrong
• E-voting vendor's Web site hacked
• James Allen
• Continuing coverage: Obama and technology

Zone

The Security Zone With the mobility of employees and the ease with which external devices can be brought in and out of a network, continuing to build your security plan for network servers and clients is a must. Fortunately, there is much that organizations can do to protect themselves from attacks - internal and external. Having the right policies, procedures and server configurations is critical... Learn more in The Security Zone See All Zones

March 25, 2008 (InfoWorld) I don't know if you've noticed lately, but our elected officials are being determined by people who can't do simple math or write a comprehensible sentence in English. And no, I don't mean people who voted for Rudy Giuliani. I'm talking about companies like Sequoia Voting Systems.

Though it hasn't received huge media coverage, New Jersey's recent presidential primary had a number of electoral snafus. About 60 of the state's Sequoia voting machines recorded the wrong number of votes cast. In other words, if 200 people in a precinct voted, and the votes were split evenly between the Democrats and Republicans, the voting machines would show a tally of either 201 or 199 votes cast. (You'll find evidence and an explanation of it here.)

One vote here or there goes askew, no big deal, right? But it does raise the question of what else the machines might have gotten wrong. And a reasonable person, concerned about the effect on our democratic process, might want to dig a little deeper into the question. That's what New Jersey's Union County officials thought when they asked Princeton researcher and e-voting wonk Ed Felten to take a look at the machines and figure out what went wrong.

Felten has a long history of finding flaws in voting machines; in past years he has demonstrated how easily a Diebold machine could be hacked and made to display inaccurate voting totals. He also showed how the locked cabinet containing the Diebold machine's memory cards could be accessed using a hotel mini-bar key. (You would of course be charged $7 for any votes added or removed.)

But Felten never got the chance to fiddle with the Sequoia machines, because the company sicced its attorneys on him and the county. They not only declined to send the machines to Felten; they dropped the notion of investigating it entirely.

Sequoia says any independent investigation would violate its trade secrets. (In related news, the Mafia would like you to know that investigating its loan-sharking operations would also violate its trade secrets.) The company posted a tortured explanation about what may have gone wrong with the New Jersey machines that is too long to excerpt here, but you can find the relevant bits on Felten's Freedom to Tinker blog.

The Sequoia response doesn't address its machines' math problems at all, but it does point out that a) these machines had basic UI and engineering problems that would earn your average electrical engineering student an F, and b) whoever wrote the explanation would also fail freshman composition. And yet these people are standing between us and the next president of the United States. What's wrong with this picture?

Reprinted with permission from

For more enterprise computing news, visit Infoworld.com
Story copyright 2006 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.