Sequoia Voting System database laid bare but no secrets found

David M Williams
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 18:36

Opinion and Analysis

Liberal US shock-blog Daily Kos gained legal access to the database used by electronic voting machines produced by Sequoia Voting Systems. The Daily Kos sensationally claimed the database violated Federal voting law. A closer examination gives a different story.

Today the site posted “breaking news” by a contributor going under the moniker Mokurai. The headline in question stated “Sequoia Voting Systems hacks self in foot.”

In essence, an organisation known as the Election Defense Alliance (EDS) was granted access to the database used for elections held in Riverside County on Sequoia’s equipment.

EDS paid $USD 105 for the rights to the database, and was not constrained by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). EDS made good use of this omission by sharing the database to members of the Open Voting Consortium (OVC) mailing list, of which Mokurai is a founding member.

Before continuing, let me go on record as having pointed out failures in closed-source voting systems in the past.

In December I spoke about how a Python programmer discovered optical Premier Election Systems, formerly known as Diebold, had a software bug which actually miscounted ballots. It turned out Premier knew of this for four years but failed to disclose it.

In August I spoke about how Premier Election Systems, again, patched a security weakness in its vote tabulation software.

This time around the specific flaw failed to record significant events that occurred – like matters as important as the deletion of votes, both during and after an election. There is no way that Premier can prove vote tampering has not taken place in elections using its system because its software simply did not record this activity.

Premier Election Systems is practically a billboard for the necessity of open source voting systems. Only open source can offer confidence through the accountability and verifiability which transparency offers. A closed source system can never be trusted wholeheartedly because its inner operations are a mystery.

In fact, the whole matter of electronic voting is widely used as an argument for why open source software exists in the first place and its philosophical raison d’être. You’ll hear this presented at any Software Freedom Day event but it is neither mere rhetoric nor a clichéd example because it is a real concern, as proven by even just the two instances above of faults in closed source systems.

Consequently, I am an advocate of open source in electronic voting systems. Yet, at the same time, I have to be logical and realistic.

Mokurai’s posting on DailyKos caught my attention due to my interest in the topic. Yet, this time the fail is not on the vendor’s side.

Let me explain, with just a touch more technical proficiency than the DailyKos.