In two weeks, New Jersey citizens will flock to the polls to fulfill their democratic duty, but they may have good reason to question the results tabulated by voting machines in some districts, according to a report compiled by computer science professor Andrew Appel ’81.
The report, titled “Insecurities and Inaccuracies of the Sequoia AVC Advantage 9.00 DRE Voting Machine,” is the first independent audit of the voting machine model currently used in New Jersey. It details the flaws of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines and shows that the machines can easily be tampered with. These voting machines are used in 18 of New Jersey’s 21 counties.
Appel prepared his research for Gusciora v. McGreevey, a New Jersey Superior Court case in which the plaintiffs are challenging the legality of New Jersey’s use of voting machines produced by Sequoia Voting Systems. One of the plaintiffs, the Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action, claims that direct-recording electronic voting machines, such as the Sequoia AVC Advantage, are not authorized under New Jersey law, which requires that each vote in an election be accurately counted. New Jersey law currently authorizes the use of paper ballots as well as both mechanical lever-action and optical-scan voting machines.
Appel was brought in as an expert witness when the lawsuit was filed in 2004. In June 2008, Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg, granting the plaintiffs’ request for an independent audit of the machines, gave Appel 30 days to deconstruct and test an official Sequoia Advantage machine and another 30 days to write a report.
“The purpose of this report for the plaintiff is to establish the basis for their argument that these machines can’t be trusted,” Appel said in an interview on Monday. “This report is a central part of the case itself.”
In September, Appel initially submitted the report for consideration in the trial, but on Sept. 24, Feinberg ordered that the report be withheld for 30 days while Sequoia prepared its own report.
“Originally the results were to be withheld for 30 days after I submitted them to give the state’s expert a chance to prepare his report so the public discussion wouldn’t be one-sided,” Appel explained.
Appel said he believes that Sequoia attempted to prevent his report from being released. “[Sequoia] kept filing motions to delay,” he said. “I think Sequoia did not want this report to ever become public.”
To prepare his report, Appel purchased Sequoia AVC Advantage machines online and dismantled them. His research group found numerous flaws with the machine.
According to the report, hackers can easily impact the machine’s vote tally. With no paper trail available, officials have no way of catching the change in the tally.
Appel’s report points out that a voter could press a series of buttons that would easily change or eliminate records of votes. There are also records of inconsistencies in vote tallying, the report found.
Computer science professor Ed Felten, another expert witness in the case, said in an interview last February that “the machines in question have had numerous failures, most recently in the … presidential primary, which saw marked discrepancies in vote tallies.”
Felten described the scenario with an analogy. “Imagine your pocket calculator couldn’t make up its mind whether 1 + 13 + 40 + 3 + 4 was 60 or 61. You’d be pretty alarmed, and you wouldn’t trust your calculator until you were very sure it was fixed. Or you’d get a new calculator,” he said.
The machines can also be installed with vote-stealing software in under eight minutes if someone pries a read-only memory chip from its socket and replaces it, Appel explained in the report’s executive summary, which can be found on his blog, Freedom to Tinker.
Furthermore, design flaws allow poll workers to disenfranchise voters, voting can be manipulated after polls close, and there are anomalies that have discounted votes, he noted on his blog.
“The AVC Advantage’s susceptibility to installation of a fraudulent vote-counting program is far more than an imperfection: it is a fatal flaw,” the report said.
Sequoia officials have released a statement responding to Appel’s report, stating that the report mischaracterized the accuracy of the machines.
“Throughout our report response, we show how simple, established, and previously used accuracy and security protections — removed from the Advantages studied in the report published by the plaintiffs — make the items in their report next to impossible,” Edwin Smith, vice president of compliance at Sequoia Voting Systems, said in the statement.
Appel said that Sequoia’s defense does not hold. “A lot of [Sequoia Voting Systems’] response is about the seals and security systems they claim are installed to protect this tampering,” he explained. “In practice, in most states that use these machines, the seals aren’t present.”
Appel explained that the security seals are located over the battery area, and whenever batteries need to be replaced, the seals are removed and rarely replaced.
Though his report demands that “New Jersey should immediately implement the 2005 law passed by the [State] Legislature, requiring an individual voter-verified record of each vote cast, by adopting precinct-count optical-scan voting equipment,” Appel said that there won’t be a chance to replace the questionable machines before Nov. 4.
“There is not time to change the system for voting, because it’s legitimately true that election officials need a few weeks to prepare their system to train their workers, and we can’t change machines right now,” Appel said.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) said in a statement on Friday that “[t]he State should take whatever action it can to detect and remedy these and other vulnerabilities and to provide back-up measures in time for the November election.”
Holt is pushing for the availability of “emergency back-up ballots,” which would be “offered to voters if there is an apparent malfunction of machines on Election Day,” according to the statement.
Holt also explained in the statement that “[t]he voter can avoid using suspect voting machines by requesting and using an absentee paper ballot, by mail or in person, per regular absentee voting procedures.”
Despite the inconsistencies he discovered with voting machines, residents should not be deterred from voting, Appel said.
“Go out and vote. Everyone better vote,” he said. “The stakes are high, and I wouldn’t do this research if I didn’t believe in democracy.”
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