Colorado county's voting machines banned after security breach

Ah yes. The conspiracy theorists really showed us! Next, proud boys and Q will team up to buy a pizza place, kidnap a bunch of kids, and create a kid prostitution ring.

This is the opposite of reality.

Colorado resident here. The CO Secretary of State has been proactive about everything election related. There's complete, transparent procedures for voting, there's educational materials about the risk limiting audits that get done for every election.

All registered voters get a ballot in the mail. You can return them by mail, use a secured drop box which reside in locations under security camera. You can check your ballot's status on-line, and get email updates. You can also vote in person, should you want, on election day.

Some yahoo state rep introduced a patently-unfair bill that would have made CO do things like stop counting on midnight of election day, which would almost certainly leave large fractions of ballots uncounted no matter how you vote, mail or in-person. No way around that. Thankfully, the CO legislature is not particularly crazy this year, so it failed.

The conspiracy theorists caused the breech - the Mesa County Clerk is the one that c illegally copied the voting machine hard drives and gave the images to other conspiracy theorists.

You are putting the blame exactly in the wrong place.

> A single person having physical access to the voting machines, months before the election, who has different political views from the Secretary, is enough to make those machines unusable.

According to the article they disabled the security cameras monitoring the machines for a week.

Once someone deliberately breaks the chain of custody on voting equipment, whether it’s electronic or a paper ballot box, it becomes suspect. Not only that, but the machines are now evidence in the investigation, so they have to be set aside anyway.

Replacing the equipment was the only option. There is no perfectly secure voting system that isn’t affected by chain of custody breaks.

The thing is, the line of reasoning that electronic voting is fundamentally not securable to a sufficient public standard was being advanced a lot before the election, and has a lot of evidence to support it.

E.g. here's sci am on 2016: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/election-sec...

Contesting only elections that don't go your way and providing dubious or nonsense evidence (see various thrown out lawsuits) is simply subverting the process and the electorate.

If they're unusable, then they're unusable everywhere : and the election needs to be run without them.

> When the entire election in a district is run by officials from a single political party, with unlimited access to the voting machines

This probably shouldn't happen. Unfortunately, hyper-polarisation has.

There’s a reason Taiwanese elections look like this: https://thediplomat.com/2020/02/taiwans-electoral-system-put...

You hit the nail on the head. Election systems must be obviously honest to low information voters in the other party who don’t trust the election officials.

"I had no opinion before now, but clearly these machines are unusable anywhere."

All politics aside, it's fairly obvious that electronic voting machines can be very dangerous unless they're handled very, very, very carefully. The contracts for these machines aren't going to the best of the best, they're going to the lowest bidders. As a software engineer, the idea of going from manual, verifiable tabulation to opaque software is completely horrifying.

It is significantly harder to forge thousands of paper ballots. Not impossible, but not nearly as easy as manipulating opaque software or simply gaining access to these machines.

People can actually observe and confirm the tabulation process currently. All machines should be open-source and easily audited if we want to inspire any sort of confidence in them to the average voter.

It was my understanding that going into the symposium, the issue of Mesa County’s machines was already on the radar and there was an active probe into Peters

i would assume that the presumption of fraud would itself lead to greater degrees of fraud with the inherent justification among partisans being 'well the other guy is doing it so this is the only way we can keep up'. that in of itself might not be that bad but if the fraud or perception of fraud has potential to act as a force multiplier for existing instabilities and intra-party paranoias then it becomes very easy to imagine the process dismantling itself. it really seems like the experiment for this decade is figuring out just how much distrust institutions can take on while still remaining functional.

Why replace the machines instead of using paper ballots?

It frankly seems like a deliberate sabotage. It doesn’t help that the county clerk is apparently attending a QAnon conspiracy conference at the moment.

Any election official that shows allegiance to such theories should be summarily banned from ever holding public office.

> Peters ordered her staff to turn off the video surveillance system that monitors the voting machines and that it was only recently turned back on.

This is probably about the point where you should ask your boss's boss "is this okay?" rather than just following orders, tbh. The whole thing is bizarre.

No reason for your question to be downvoted. I've done my small part to reverse that.

I doubt the officials suspect the machines have been compromised, but they have no way of knowing. There are chain of custody rules to help ensure integrity of the systems. Those have been violated so the machines can't be used until they've been carefully examined and recertified.

Putting this in a money context might help some--lets say you owned slot machines that could have big payouts. Would you let rando unauthorized person to be alone with one of your machines in a private office, doing upgrades, and still trust the machine? Probably not. You'd want to take a look at it top to bottom before trusting it to do any payouts. The person might not have done anything wrong but you've got to be sure first, and since there are other ways these things could be compromised than just adding unauthorized software to the hard drive, a clean install isn't enough.

> How is one person being present during an upgrade enough to render the physical machines suspect and beyond repair/review?

As soon as an unidentified attacker has unsupervised access to a piece of hardware it's game over. An exploit that uses persistence features like embedding itself into the BIOS/UEFI firmware (see e.g. https://www.coresecurity.com/core-labs/articles/the-bios-emb...) can be very hard to get rid of - so hard that it's likely easier to dispose of the machines entirely.

> Can't they just wipe them clean and restart

They’re now evidence in an ongoing investigation. They don’t know exactly what happened to them because the perpetrators deliberately disabled the security cameras monitoring the machines before doing whatever they did.

Wiping them could destroy evidence or it could miss a different issue (hardware modification, for example).

The only reasonable response is to quarantine the machines as evidence and replace them with new machines with a known chain of custody.

> How is one person being present during an upgrade enough to render the physical machines suspect and beyond repair/review?

There’s more to the story, including someone intentionally disabling the security cameras that monitored the machines for at least a week. With a gap in the surveillance of the machines combined with a QAnon-associated leak and an intruder who misled the office, it’s time to start fresh and set the old machines aside as evidence.

> Can't they just wipe them clean and restart?

I mean, _probably_. There's malware that's extremely difficult to get rid of, but probably it wasn't used here.

But it looks like they have elections coming up in a few weeks, so "do it on paper" is probably a not-unreasonable precaution, particularly given the general pattern of dodginess, in particular the thing about the video surveillance.

If nothing else, if you phone up the manufacturer and tell them that a weird pillow website devotee allowed some unknown third party to potentially mess with the machines, the manufacturer is probably _not_ going to say "yeah, that'll definitely be fine, use them"; they won't want to take the risk. This is probably a return-to-manufacturer job.

The uniparty does not want secure, fast, accurate election. Election manipulation is the game... Neither side of the uniparty want to admit that though and believe "their side" is the pure and virtuous side, where as the "others" are evil vote stealers or suppressors

Australia has a simple and trustable election system. Paper ballots, reinforced by the fact that more or less every citizen can get a job working on election day. Your duties include looking up people based on what they say their name an address is (no ID required; although many electors hand me their ID anyway) on a big electoral roll book, cross out their name, and hand them a ballot with your initials.

They go to one of the booths and mark their selection, and drop it off into a zip-tied big ballot box (that is visible to the general public, and of course election staff at all times).

After the polls close, the polling official cuts the zip-ties on the ballot boxes, everyone working sorts ballots into piles and count them, along with scrutineers from political parties who can watch. An officer-in-charge records and publishes the results continuously, and everything is saved and shipped for OCR-based recounting to verify the numbers. The process is federally operated and the same processes are followed everywhere.

Results are almost always revealed on election night.

The electoral roll books are processed centrally after every election, so someone who votes twice would be quickly caught. Someone who votes under fake names and addresses would most likely cross-over with someone else, hence an investigation would still happen. (We also have compulsory voting, which is another subject for debate, but it does mean "vote under multiple names" is mitigated without the need for ID laws).

The job pays reasonably well (A$457 for the day), more or less everyone who applies gets hired (I believe there is a bias towards maximizing first-time applicants), and it's hard to think about election fraud when every citizen can be part of the election process itself, and it's hard to conceive of how fraud can happen.

> Whole countries with public counting of paper ballots have election results faster than we do.

How many of those countries have as many races on a typical presidential-year ballot as the US does?

The US is also generally pretty fast to count its ballots; note that the election result is usually known within hours of polls closing, despite the insane number of races on the ballots. What happened in 2020 is there was an unusually high number of mail-in ballots, and this was combined with several states intentionally slowing down the counting process.

Hand counting of ballots works well when you're only voting for a single elected office. In the US, most elections involve voting for many different offices all on the same ballot.

Really, we should just be switching to using scantron style ballots everywhere. They're paper ballots which can be efficiently counted by a machine, and are super easy to manually recount later

I agree, the overly complex use of machines, followed by closed door counting, lends it self too much to impropriety. I think America has mostly honest elections, but after last year‘s election I am… Uneasy about the whole system. Simple is better.

This system is simple but it’s neither fast nor available. The thing you have to worry about with this kind of system is ballot stuffing which leads to needing an additional requirement to verify each voter and observe them filling out and depositing the ballot. This creates a bottleneck at the polls which is why every election there are news stories about people having heat strokes or being turned away after the polls close.

It’s also not available because making people show up to a few set of fixed locations at specific polling hours will exclude people who don’t have access to transportation which is why during the Obama election the big thing was the Obama campaign providing busses to voters.

If you’re willing to give up some anonymity (only that you voted not what/you voted for) then mail in ballots, public drop-boxes, and walk-in deposits are much faster and more available. If you can mail in then great! Done. If you want to go to the polls then you fill out your ballot ahead of time, verify yourself with the poll worker and then drop it in the box. Done. 30 seconds a person rather than 10 minutes a person.

I think the culture in the US surrounding voting is the real issue. The discussion is always around security and integrity and making sure only the right people vote which are the kind of problems people who read too many Tom Clancy books care about. Meanwhile we only get at most ~50% turnout every year and people have to fight to actually cast their ballots. And we pretend that our election results actually mean something when half the country doesn’t vote and the sample that does is so skewed because the factors that keep people from voting aren’t random.

My only issue with a paper-only drop box is there's no redundancy. I would think with having poll watchers from multiple affiliations and multiple shifts per day to ensure you have many eyes on the box it wouldn't be a concern. But, if someone or some group managed to figure out a way to "stuff the box," you'd have no proof it happened.

I really like the system we have in DFW now. We have a global voter roll so you can vote in any location in your county. You submit your vote on a machine, which keeps a local machine-level tally and prints out a paper ballot. You verify the contents of the paper ballot, then drop it into a vote counting box, which scans, tallies, and displays your vote for you to confirm. If at any time anything looks wrong, you notify a poll worker to resolve it. At the end of each day, they verify the counts on the machines and ballot box match, then the ballot counter/box is locked along with the memory cards of each individual machine, so you have day-by-day results.

When the election ends, the ballot boxes are delivered to a central county counting system where they are put into another large-scale counting machine to verify that the counts there match the local counter/box. If at any point there's too many discrepancies, they'll do hand counts of the paper ballots. They can also unlock the voting machine memory cards if necessary. All of this process is done under the supervision of poll watchers.

In theory, you get near instantaneous results as each voting location can simply total the ballot box results and report them. You also have 4 separate systems (voting machine, local counter/ballot box, central counter, paper backups) that would need to be compromised to successfully tamper with the results.

I'm sure it wouldn't make a conspiracy theorist satisfied, but to me, it's a system that balances speed and convenience with the simplicity and security(?) of a paper ballot, without unnecessarily obfuscating the process behind electronic-only voting.

i still refer people to this also. He neatly summarises the core issues. People watching other people count marks on dead trees works great.

The Brazilian design for voting machines addresses most of those concerns in a nice way. I couldn’t find a full description in English but Wikipedia has a few bits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil

There is also the Emmy Nominated HBO Documentary "Hacking Democracy", from 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy

Taiwan has the best vote counting procedure. Inefficiency is feature. Ballots are hold up, choice is announced and score is publicly tracked.

https://youtu.be/cqKt-lPfJuw

I like Tom but I think he's wrong to dismiss vote machine + paper receipt as an "expensive pencil". You get the best of both worlds with this option. The benefits of the voting machine give voters more screen real estate to view the candidates for a single race, more chances to correct their vote, and even the option to randomize candidate placement. You also get faster vote tally by doing it electronically. In addition if you produce a paper receipt you now have a physical backup to verify individual machines or precincts as a whole. You could craft policy to automatically do audits on say 30% of the machines before actually releasing the tally, with the option to do a full audit if needed.

It’s a safety precaution.

Consider it like a supply chain breach: If you discover that your supply chain has been possibly tampered with by QAnon-associated conspiracy bloggers who deliberately lied to circumvent background check requirements and who also disabled the security cameras that week, you replace the equipment to be safe while you investigate.

> Griswold also said that one week before the breach, Peters ordered her staff to turn off the video surveillance system that monitors the voting machines and that it was only recently turned back on.

Precautions for supply chain breaches aren’t unique to voting machines. If you discover supply chain tampering for anything security-sensitive, you replace the gear. This goes for everything from people’s laptops to network equipment.

The full article has more details. This wasn’t just a simple leak. There’s some strange corruption involved at that office.

The inspection seems to have included the administrator passwords. That seems like something worth hiding from the general public.

Given the audits and investigations of past elections, and that up until the summer of 2020 most democratic leadership were saying the election would be fraudulent, why aren’t we allowing republicans to audit to their heart’s content? What could it possibly hurt to make it completely open and accountable, for whatever they feel was sketchy? Surely national harmony is worth a Stacy Abrams style audit?

It looks like the safer way to vote is avoiding technology, which I find a bit counterintuitive even though many countries rely on paper and people counting, I've even done it once (forced by law). I don't know how wrong I might be in this, but it looks to me like it systems are vulnerable by nature and hence the only secure voting system seems to be a system that avoids relying entirely on IT systems.

The technical problem is solvable, but the security and transparency (to the public) are harder to get, specially the security aspect since blockchain technology could potentially help dealing with transparency.

>This past election cycle politicized

The past election cycle? You mean 2020? IIRC even back in 2016 there were significant concerns that russians were hacking election machines.

I grew up in Mesa county.

Last time i visited the MJ dispensaries were just over the county line; that stuff is not allowed in Mesa County. Boebert is the Congressional Rep.

For Colorado, low wages, very Republican, general lower education.

And the last thing they need it to waste public money on this kind of BS.

>I might be tempted to say that the voters of Mesa County deserve having their freedoms stolen away. A vital part of democracy is holding transgressors accountable, and the voters of Mesa County have failed their responsibility.

I mean, if she really was deliberately messing with the counting somehow, the result of the vote doesn't necessarily reflect what the voters actually voted for?

Yes, Colorado voting is secure, and yes, a conspiracy theorist, who happens to be Mesa County's Clerk and Recorder, is completely to blame for the security breech. What you're leaving out is that because the election didn't turn out the way the Clerk wanted, she's muddying the waters and making further fair elections far more difficult.

On the flipside - this was caught, an investigation has opened, the public was notified and mitigating steps were taken to ensure election security. IMO this is what it looks like when the system is functioning well.