In the conventional paper slip voting system, any claims for
miscalculations in vote counting can always allow for a
recount.
However, in a system where unscrupulous ballot box stuffing and
ballot box switching, much depends on the integrity and neutrality
of the Election Commissioner, and any body of independent observers
being present during the electioning process.
Unfortunately, in Singapore, where Third World Politics is
practised and refined into a One Party Ruled Government that ruled
Singapore with a strong grip in all spheres of Human Activities for
the last 38 years, much remains to be desired if the reported flaws
in the proposed E-Voting is to be implemented.
The following is an article should raise some concern:
More reasosn why Singaporeans must oppose
e-voting
28 July 2003
The PAP has announced that it will go ahead and use
e-voting at the next general elections. Singaporeans should be
worried - very worried.
E-voting open to fraud, say
experts
John Schwartz
New York Times
24 July 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html?ex=1059710400&en=d989a69c518293a6&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains
serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and
permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected,
computer security researchers said yesterday.
"We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin,
technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns
Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from
Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines
operating in the United States.
The systems, in which voters are given computer-chip-bearing smart
cards to operate the machines, could be tricked by anyone with $100
worth of computer equipment, said Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of
the paper.
"With what we found, practically anyone in the country from a
teenager on up could produce these smart cards that could allow
someone to vote as many times as they like," Mr. Stubblefield
said.
The software was initially obtained by critics of electronic
voting, who discovered it on a Diebold Internet site in January.
This is the first review of the software by recognized computer
security experts.
A spokesman for Diebold, Joe Richardson, said the company could not
comment in detail until it had seen the full report. He said that
the software on the site was "about a year old" and that "if there
were problems with it, the code could have been rectified or
changed" since then. The company, he said, puts its software
through rigorous testing.
"We're constantly improving it so the technology we have 10 years
from now will be better than what we have today," Mr. Richardson
said. "We're always open to anything that can improve our
systems."
Another co-author of the paper, Tadayoshi Kohno, said it was
unlikely that the company had plugged all of the holes they
discovered.
"There is no easy fix," Mr. Kohno said.
The move to electronic voting which intensified after the
troubled Florida presidential balloting in 2000 has been a source
of controversy among security researchers. They argue that the
companies should open their software to public review to be sure it
operates properly.
Mr. Richardson of Diebold said the company's voting-machine source
code, the basis of its computer program, had been certified by an
independent testing group. Outsiders might want more access, he
said, but "we don't feel it's necessary to turn it over to everyone
who asks to see it, because it is proprietary."
Diebold is one of the most successful companies in this field.
Georgia and Maryland are among its clients, as are many counties
around the country. The Maryland contract, announced this month, is
worth $56 million.
Diebold, based in North Canton, Ohio, is best known as a maker of
automated teller machines. The company acquired Global Election
Systems last year and renamed it Diebold Election Systems. Last
year the election unit contributed more than $110 million in sales
to the company's $2 billion in revenue.
As an industry leader, Diebold has been the focus of much of the
controversy over high-tech voting. Some people, in comments widely
circulated on the Internet, contend that the company's software has
been designed to allow voter fraud. Mr. Rubin called such
assertions "ludicrous" and said the software's flaws showed the
hallmarks of poor design, not subterfuge.
The list of flaws in the Diebold software is long, according to the
paper, which is online at avirubin .com/vote.pdf. Among other
things, the researchers said, ballots could be altered by anyone
with access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting
a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an
opponent.
The kind of scrutiny that the researchers applied to the Diebold
software would turn up flaws in all but the most rigorously
produced software, Mr. Stubblefield said. But the standards must be
as high as the stakes, he said.
"This isn't the code for a vending machine," he said. "This is the
code that protects our democracy."
Still, things that seem troubling in coding may not be as big a
problem in the real world, Mr. Richardson said. For example,
counties restrict access to the voting machines before and after
elections, he said. While the researchers "are all experts at
writing code, they may not have a full understanding of how
elections are run," he said.
But Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at
the University of Iowa, said he was shocked to discover flaws cited
in Mr. Rubin's paper that he had mentioned to the system's
developers about five years ago as a state elections
official.
"To find that such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade
is awful," Professor Jones said.
Peter G. Neumann, an expert in computer security at SRI
International, said the Diebold code was "just the tip of the
iceberg" of problems with electronic voting systems.
"This is an iceberg that needs to be hacked at a good bit," Mr.
Neumann said, "so this is a step forward."
http://www.singaporedemocrat.org/news_display.php?id=309