E-voting: What can go wrong

Interview: Edward Felten, a go-to expert witness on some of the major security and software issues of our time, tackles these and other e-voting topics

IDGNS : I'd be curious to know what poll observers can do in those states where there is e-voting with no paper audit trail, for example right here in New Jersey, to find out if voters are experiencing problems?

Felten: One thing to do obviously is to just be alert and look for behaviors that aren't supposed to happen: To check the records that the machines do make at the beginning and the end of the day and make sure that everything is as it should be, and that the numbers add up and are consistent and so on, but especially just watching to see if anything unusual happens and then recording what does happen. There's one more thing actually that is important to do, and that is to make sure the machines are guarded, that the machines are not left unprotected so that someone could get access to them.

IDGNS: The Democrats apparently have an army of lawyers fanning out across the country. What, if anything, can they do if there are claims of e-voting problems in those states where there is no paper trail?

Felten: It depends on the nature of the problems. Some kinds of problems might be evident, if there are votes that are missing, that are garbled in the electronic records: That would be something that is evident, and then you would have a fight about what would be done to remedy the problem. Other kinds of potential problems might take more technical investigation to get to the bottom of, and you could imagine scenarios then when there has to be some kind of investigation to figure out, as best you can, what actually happened.

IDGNS: How widely do you expect post-election audits to be conducted in states where there is e-voting with a paper trail?

Felten: In a lot of places we won't have post-election audits unless there's some recount declared or some other reason to suspect something is wrong, and I think that's unfortunate, because I think that if you're going to keep the paper and electronic records of each vote you ought to do at least some checking to make sure that they're consistent. A paper record that you never look at doesn't do much as a quality control mechanism.

IDGNS: Do you think random checks are necessary?

Felten: Random checks, random audits for sure are valuable. Most of the plausible post-election audit systems involve some kind of randomness. Just because it's super-expensive to recount all of the ballots by hand, it's something you only want to do when it's absolutely necessary. But if you pick randomly and pick randomly in the right way, you can still have high confidence that if there is a problem that's big enough to affect an election result, you could find it.

IDGNS: What’s your concept of an ideal, "crack-proof" voting system?

Felten: There's a lot of things that could be done better than today's systems to protect systems against tampering. Ultimately the protections have to be out of the voting machine itself, and the whole voting process has to be designed so that human processes of oversight and observation can help to secure the system. You won't be able to necessarily prevent the machine from being tampered with, but you can hope to notice the tampering and hope to be able to figure out what the voters really wanted to do regardless of tampering.