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Two Ohio researchers have discovered that some of the state’s e-voting machines put a timestamp on each ballot, which severely erodes the secrecy of ballots. The researchers, James Moyer and Jim Cropcho, used the state’s open records law to get access to ballot records, according to Declan McCullagh’s story at news.com. The pair say they have reconstructed the individual ballots for a county tax referendum in Delaware County, Ohio.

Timestamped ballots are a problem because polling-place procedures often record the time or sequence of voter’s arrivals. For example, at my polling place in New Jersey, each voter is given a sequence number which is recorded next to the voter’s name in the poll book records and is recorded in notebooks by Republican and Democratic poll watchers. If I’m the 74th voter using the machine today, and the recorded ballots on that machine are timestamped or kept in order, then anyone with access to the records can figure out how I voted. That, of course, violates the secret ballot and opens the door to coercion and vote-buying.

Most e-voting systems that have been examined get this wrong. In the recent California top-to-bottom review, researchers found that the Diebold system stores the ballots in the order they were cast and with timestamps (report pp. 49-50), and the Hart (report pp. 59) and Sequoia (report p. 64) systems “randomize” stored ballots in an easily reversible fashion. Add in the newly discovered ES&S system, and the vendors are 0-for-4 in protecting ballot secrecy.

You’d expect the vendors to hurry up and fix these problems, but instead they’re just shrugging them off.

An ES&S spokeswoman at the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm downplayed concerns about vote linking. “It’s very difficult to make a direct correlation between the order of the sign-in and the timestamp in the unit,” said Jill Friedman-Wilson.

This is baloney. If you know the order of sign-ins, and you can put the ballots in order by timestamp, you’ll be able to connect them most of the time. You might make occasional mistakes, but that won’t reassure voters who want secrecy.

You know things are bad when questions about a technical matter like security are answered by a public-relations firm. Companies that respond constructively to security problems are those that see them not merely as a PR (public relations) problem but as a technology problem with PR implications. The constructive response in these situations is to say, “We take all security issues seriously and we’re investigating this report.”

Diebold, amazingly, claims that they don’t timestamp ballots – even though they do:

Other suppliers of electronic voting machines say they do not include time stamps in their products that provide voter-verified paper audit trails…. A spokesman for Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions), said they don’t for security and privacy reasons: “We’re very sensitive to the integrity of the process.”

You have to wonder why e-voting vendors are so much worse at responding to security flaw reports than makers of other products. Most software vendors will admit problems when they’re real, will work constructively with the problems’ discoverers, and will issue patches promptly. Companies might try PR bluster once or twice, but they learn that bluster doesn’t work and they’re just driving away customers. The e-voting companies seem to make the same mistakes over and over.