[EL] Does the current recount effort meet the standards of the U of Michigan Computer Science Security expert

[Charles Stewart III]

It won’t meet the standards of the types of post-election audits that Halderman and others (myself included) prefer, precisely because in some cases, the machines will simply be run again.  I just saw a summary of the methods that county boards of elections will use, and I think there will be more hand-recounting of scanner-tabulated ballots than some are supposing, but this will not be a pure post-election audit to satisfy the most skeptical.



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Charles Stewart III
Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts   02139
617-253-3127
cstewart at mit.edu

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of John Shockley
Sent: Friday, December 02, 2016 10:46 AM
To: lminnite at gmail.com
Cc: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: [EL] Does the current recount effort meet the standards of the U of Michigan Computer Science Security expert


Dear Members:
The article about Professor J. Alex Halderman is below:

https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.9atvcvxmy

I don't know if just putting the ballots through the optical scanning machines again to count the ballots, as most of Wisconsin is doing, would detect the hacking.  Do any of you know, or has Halderman said so?  If the malware was designed to disappear after the election, then it seems that putting the ballots through the optical scanner three weeks later would show different results.  I know that it is better is to physically count the ballots, as Minnesota did in the Franken/Coleman contest.  That way you can also count ballots the computer can't--if the circle is not filled in completely, or if someone circles the circle instead of filling it in, etc.  Counting those mistakes, where the intent of the voter is obvious, makes for a more accurate count, but that is unrelated to the issue of malware in the machines.
For the record, I believe Halderman said that it was unlikely the hacking occurred, but possible, and that he and his Ph.D. students could design such a hacking program.
John Shockley
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