"If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines"

by Thom Hartmann

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill (www.thehill.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

Abstract   This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

Florida: The Harri Hursti Hack and its Importance to our Nation

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=798&Itemid=51

The Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, authorized a "test" of his Diebold voting system to see if election results could be altered using only a memory card. Harri Hursti (photo at right), a computer programmer from Finland, who has been working with Black Box Voting, facilitated the test and it has come to be known as the "Harri Hursti Hack."

THE MACHINERY OF DEMOCRACY: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World

http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/dem_vr_hava_modsecurity.html

On June 28, 2006, the Brennan Center released a report by its Voting System Security Task Force on the security of electronic voting systems. The Task Force was composed of internationally renowned government, academic, and private-sector scientists, voting machine experts and security professionals; together, they conducted the nation's first systematic analysis of security vulnerabilities in the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems.

Most broadly, the report found:

· All three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections.

· The most troubling vulnerabilities of each system can be substantially remedied if proper countermeasures are implemented at the state and local level.

· Few jurisdictions have implemented any of the key countermeasures that could make the least difficult attacks against voting systems much more difficult to execute successfully.

Court Upholds Colorado Voters Challenge to Electronic Voting System

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1812&Itemid=113

In a legal victory this afternoon in the Colorado voters' lawsuit challenging Secretary of State's Gigi Dennis' cursory certification of electronic  voting systems manufactured by Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, and Hart Intercivic, the  District Court in Denver decided that it will not permit the use of  these systems post November 7th until real security standards are  adopted and the machines are retested to meet these standards. In his ruling, Judge Lawrence Manzanares said the Secretary of state had  failed to create minimum security standards, as required by state law, and did an "abysmal" job of documenting the  testing during its certification process.