Will Your Vote Count in 2006?

[IDemo]

'When you're using a paperless voting system, there is no security,' says Stanford's David Dill.

By Steven Levy
Newsweek

May 29, 2006 issue - Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the voting booth, here comes more disturbing news about the trustworthiness of electronic touchscreen ballot machines. Earlier this month a report by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines for an organization called Black Box Voting. Hursti found unheralded vulnerabilities in the machines that are currently entrusted to faithfully record the votes of millions of Americans.

How bad are the problems? Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever documented. Basically the trouble stems from the ease with which the machine's software can be altered. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that, if it contained malicious code, could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. The machine could go dead on Election Day or throw votes to the wrong candidate. Worse, it's even possible for such ballot-tampering software to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems. "If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor and elections-security expert.

Diebold Election Systems spokesperson David Bear says Hursti's findings do not represent a fatal vulnerability in Diebold technology, but simply note the presence of a feature that allows access to authorized technicians to periodically update the software. If it so happens that someone not supposed to use the machine—or an election official who wants to put his or her thumb on the scale of democracy—takes advantage of this fast track to fraud, that's not Diebold's problem. " throwing out a 'what if' that's premised on a basis of an evil, nefarious person breaking the law," says Bear.

Those familiar with the actual election process—by and large run by honest people but historically subject to partisan politicking, dirty tricks and sloppy practices—are less sanguine. "It gives me a bit of alarm that the voting systems are subject to tampering and errors," says Democratic Rep. William Lacy Clay, who worries that machines in his own St. Louis district might be affected by this vulnerability. (In Maryland and Georgia, all the machines are Diebold's.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek/from/RS.5/

[bullimiami]

1. probably not.

[DFW]

2. Up to now?

It seems that close races where these Republican-made machines have
been used ALL go to the Republicans--some following the polls, some
completely defying the polls. In such races, the Democrat never wins,
at least not so far. Plus, every time an independent techician has
made an examination, the machines have been proven to be subject
to hacking, manipulation, or to have been just plain defective.

These machines have been further protected from forensic post-election
examination by a Republican judge who has, in effect, said that the results
may be public property, but the machines themselves, are not, and so
without a specific court order, no post-election forensic examination
of the Diebold (or Triad, or ESS, or whoever) machines may take place
without the consent of the manufacturer, who **surprise!!** does not
give such consent.

These machines belong out of the ballotting process altogether.

Maybe if we have Finnish-made voting machines, run by impartial
Finnish technicians, maybe THEN we might trust the results to
be reported accurately. I trust the Finns far more than I trust Diebold.

[IDemo]

3. "premised on a basis of an evil, nefarious person breaking the law,"

Luckily there are no evil, nefarious persons in America. Right? :eyes: