----- Original Message ----- 
From: "garryshay" <GSS1@AOL.COM>
To: <DemocraticNewsGroup@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2004 8:44 AM
Subject: [DemocraticNewsGroup] How to Hack an Election

How to Hack an Election
New York Times
Editorial
31 January 04

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/opinion/31SAT1.html?
th=&pagewanted=print&position=
 
oncerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting 
technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal 
elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a 
computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers 
had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the 
machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows 
convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, 
starting with voter-verified paper trails.

When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, 
there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-
screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, 
were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack 
on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil 
the safeguards and interfere with an election.

They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they 
reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote 
multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting 
terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw 
and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote 
location.

Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, 
but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem 
almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have 
identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by 
any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making 
duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved 
unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in "approximately 
10 seconds."

Diebold, the machines' manufacturer, rushed to issue a self-
congratulatory press release with the headline "Maryland Security 
Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March 
Primary." The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun 
so positively. Their report said that if flaws they identified were 
fixed, the machines could be used in Maryland's March 2 primary. But 
in the long run, they said, an extensive overhaul of the machines and 
at least a limited paper trail are necessary.

The Maryland study confirms concerns about electronic voting that are 
rapidly accumulating from actual elections. In Boone County, Ind., 
last fall, in a particularly colorful example of unreliability, an 
electronic system initially recorded more than 144,000 votes in an 
election with fewer than 19,000 registered voters, County Clerk Lisa 
Garofolo said. Given the growing body of evidence, it is clear that 
electronic voting machines cannot be trusted until more safeguards 
are in place.



 

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