• The 2000 US Presidential election was decided by four counties in Florida.
• Machine counts showed a margin of just over 300 votes favoring Bush.
• Gore supporters claimed ballots were undercounted in Gore-favoring areas due to the Votomatic key-punch technology used in those areas.
• Ballots were rejected for Incomplete key-punches, called hanging chads.
• Gore supporters argued a manual recount could discern the intended votes and change the outcome.
• Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual recount.
• US Supreme Court halted the recount.

• Belgium votes are by party.

  • A voter can vote for one party,
  • or can choose preferred candidates from a list within the same party.
  • All votes for party’s list decide whether the party wins.

• In 2003, one individual candidate got more votes than the party list, implying a machine error.

• Possible explanations:

  • Fraud (poorly executed)
  • Software mistake
  • Electronic fault

• An audit found no evidence of fraud or programming mistakes, so…

Candidate Maria received 514 votes. In a computer, this number is split into “bits” which work sort of like an abacus.

Each “bit” is either 0 or 1, but the value of a bit increases with its position.

A bit’s value doubles with each successive position.

In this example, bits are “1” at positions 1 and 9, so we add the corresponding values, 2+512, to get the total 514.

Suppose an error occurs in a single position – position 12 in the figure – then the total value is altered.

In this case, the vote tally is increased by 4,096, for a total of 4,610.

A single nano-scopic glitch can have major consequences for the system.

Problems specific to DREs:

• Touch-screen miscalibration (finger is detected in the wrong place).
• Paper errors (mechanical failure, paper runs out, etc).
• Programming errors are not uncommon.
• Privatized design and manufacturing inspire speculative conspiracy theories.
• Hacking. Several security flaws have been demonstrated.

Measuring the X (horizontal) position:

Measuring the Y (vertical) position:

Good calibration

Bad calibration

In the Presidential election of 2004, polling data suggested that John Kerry would likely win, yet George W. Bush was elected by a sizeable margin, more than 3 million votes.

Some activists claimed there were irregularities in DRE voting:

• Conflicts of interest:
  • CEO of Diebold was a Bush fundraiser.
  • Senator Chuck Hagel (a Bush ally) was former chairman of DRE maker ES&S.
• Data anomalies:
  • Poll analysis appeared to show “excess” Bush votes in counties that used DRE machines.
  • (The discrepancy can be attributed to the polling data, not the vote tally).
• No paper trail:
  • HAVA requires paper receipts, but the regulation was not yet implemented in 2004.
• Felon Programmers:
  • A former executive tied to Diebold was convicted of altering records in a computerized accounting system, in an unrelated case.

From the study abstract (emphasis added):

an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab.

While there was no specific evidence that malicious hacking occurred in 2004, these findings further undermined trust in DRE machines and fueled conspiracy speculation into the next election.

Even updated DRE machines have major bug reports.

In a 2019 judge’s race in Northampton PA:

• ES&S machines tallied just 164 votes for the favored candidate.

• After a hand count, the vote increased to 26,142, winning the election.

How is this possible?

An estimated 30 percent of the Election Systems & Software ExpressVote XL machines were improperly calibrated by the company, leading to “hypersensitivity” problems in registering some voter choices. In addition, problems with the ballot layout – also blamed on the manufacturer – led to problems electronically tabulating votes the night of the election, Nov. 5.

“I want to make clear that this was human error, and ES&S takes full accountability,” Adam Carbullido, ES&S senior vice president of product development, said during a news conference alongside county Executive Lamont McClure at the county courthouse in Easton.

He apologized to the county administration, which recommended to county council the purchase of 320 of the new machines earlier this year to comply with a state mandate to begin creating a paper-ballot trail of votes. The $2.88 million contract includes hardware, software, maintenance and support and firmware licensing.

Optical scan ballots are widely used in vote-by-mail systems.

Prior to the 2020 election, Utah instituted universal vote-by-mail.

Benefits of Optical Scan Technology:

• Reduces exposure to hacking.
• Easy to audit and verify by re-count or hand-count.
• Equipment is specialized, fewer types of failure.

Drawbacks:

• Electronic errors: Scanners sometimes mis-read ballots.
• Human errors: Election workers operate counting equipment incorrectly.
• Voter failure: Voters mark ballots improperly.
• Opaque Process: Voters cannot confirm their votes are correctly counted.

In spite of the drawbacks, mail voting is probably the most secure and reliable approach available.

• Accidental marks or creases.
• Printing errors, unreadable bar codes or QR codes.
• Some inks not detectable by imaging scanner.
• Votes indicated with check-marks, circles, stars, etc.
• Ballots mis-aligned in feed mechanism.
• Ballots fed upside down.
• Humidity effects (e.g. paper jams, ink smears).
• Programming errors still occur.

• Since 2000, election challenges have become routine.

• The dubious field of “election forensics” emerged.

• Conspiracy theories reached an apex in 2020 (we hope).

• Voting machine errors have always been present, but now…

  • More voters are motivated to look for them,
  • Phones make it easy to document them,
  • Social media makes it easy to broadcast them.

• So many bug reports would be great, except that people see them as evidence of coordinated wrongdoing.

• Conspiracy theories have targeted every type of voting process.

  • Self-styled “forensics experts” circulate lengthy documents with inflammatory accusations.
  • Some political groups are exploiting the moment.
  • Recent accusations about Dominion voting machines resemble the 2004 Diebold conspiracy theory, only the parties are switched.

This blog post promotes the Dominion conspiracy theory (it has nothing to do with Utah):

• Today, people arrange their informational lives around their prior beliefs.

• It can seem that their personal opinions represent the majority.

• When reality doesn’t match, it can be hard to process.

• A Utah County candidate speculated about fraud in last month’s primary:

Sylvia Andrew, of Provo, said she ran for a state Senate seat.

“So I know a little about running for office, I’ve gone door to door many times … And this last election just seemed fishy. I just can’t believe that every single America first, patriotic kind of person for election integrity, everyone that I know of except for Kera Birkeland lost their primary races,” he said.

“I’m not a statistician, but it doesn’t make sense. So this is vital that we have election integrity. And I don’t trust machines either, I don’t trust ’em.”

• It’s hard to tell that you’re on the fringe when your entire media and social life are centered in the fringe.

• There’s a lot of commonality

  • Diebold made ATMs before getting into voting machines.
  • Need to process hundreds of millions of private transactions.
  • Lots of computers and telecommunications involved.
  • Receipts, audits and recounts are important to the process.
  • Mail is used.
  • Low tolerance for error.

• Bank errors do happen.

• What do banks do differently?

• Many large financial institutions use specialized mainframe computers specifically designed to correct and recover from faults.
• An important example is the Tandem Computer, which originated in 1974. From Wikipedia:

Tandem Computers, Inc. was the dominant manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems for ATM networks, banks, stock exchanges, telephone switching centers, and other similar commercial transaction processing applications requiring maximum uptime and zero data loss….

…Tandem’s NonStop systems use a number of independent identical processors and redundant storage devices and controllers to provide automatic high-speed “failover” in the case of a hardware or software failure. To contain the scope of failures and of corrupted data, these multi-computer systems have no shared central components, not even main memory.

• The Tandem computer systems evolved into the modern HPE NonStop server products.

• To represent currency amounts, financial systems often use a modified form of binary called “Binary Coded Decimal”.

• This is done for a simple reason:

  • Binary denominations multiply or divide by 2.
  • Currency denominations multiply or divide by 10.

• It turns out there’s no way to write “0.1” in binary!

  • Standard computers approximate it as “0.01111111” or something similar.

• BCD represents decimal numbers using 4 “bits” for each digit (see the table at right).

• So if the number is 42.15, the BCD representation is:

  4     2    .   1     5
  
 0100  0010  .  0001  0101

• BCD numbers require specialized software and/or hardware functions to process.

Digit  |  BCD
-------|------
0      | 0000
1      | 0001
2      | 0010
3      | 0011
4      | 0100
5      | 0101
6      | 0110
7      | 0111
8      | 1000
9      | 1001

The “Common Business Oriented Language” (COBOL) is a unique programming language.

• Based on the FLOW-MATIC language developed by Grace Hopper in 1955.
• It pre-dates nearly all other programming languages used today, and it doesn’t resemble anything that modern students learn.
• In 1997, 80% of the world’s businesses ran COBOL on mainframe systems.
• Today, “43% of banking systems still used COBOL with over 220 billion lines of COBOL code in use”, along with many federal agencies (including the IRS).

• The banking industry has been unable to move away from COBOL.
• Computing education has forgotten about COBOL.
• The majority of COBOL programmers are over 50.