County's voting machines examined
Brunner triggers state probe by reporting that fall ballot apparently masked a name
Sunday, March 16, 2008 3:22 AM
BY BARBARA CARMEN
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
When Jennifer Brunner cast her vote last fall, she is certain she saw something so odd on her touch-screen voting machine that it prompted a state criminal investigation into the Franklin County Board of Elections.
At least 15 of the county's electronic machines are under double-lock at an Alum Creek warehouse. It is being treated as a crime scene.
County elections officials asked the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation to seize the machines during the investigation by Attorney General Marc Dann and forensics consultants.
Brunner said consultants from SysTest Labs in Colorado, however, were skeptical. When she described the gray box with the faint words "candidate withdrawn," the investigators told her, "That's exactly what you'd see if someone masked a name."
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SysTest investigators also found that the board had not performed a routine test of the computer software on each machine, instead testing just one machine in each precinct.
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Investigators also discovered that a board programmer turned off "audit logs" in the voting machines in April 2007, hindering investigators from reconstructing software changes. White found that the vendor had instructed a board employee on how to disable audits to speed programming.
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/03/16/BOEPROBE.ART_ART_03-16-08_B1_9F9LIV3.html?sid=101HERE IS WHAT THAT LEFT WING GOSSIP MAGAZINE ( :SARCASM: ) SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN HAS TO SAY:
August 18, 2008 in Technology |
Planning to E-Vote? Read This First
With less than three months before the presidential election, the hotly contested state, Ohio, along with others, continue to have problems with E-voting technology
By Larry Greenemeier
ELECTRONIC VOTING: Most states have invested in some type of E-voting technology. Are they confident enough to use it on election day?
In their rush to avoid a repeat of the controversy that plagued the 2000 presidential election, and to meet the requirements of Congress's hastily mandated2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), states and counties flocked to electronic voting systems they hoped would eliminate hanging chads and other flaws inherent in paper-based systems. Six years later, with another presidential election less than three months away, many e-voting systems are fraught with security glitches, and the technology has yet to prove itself as the solution voters were looking for.
Such systems could allow voters and poll workers to place multiple votes, crash the systems by loading viruses, and fake vote tallies, according to studies commissioned by the states of California and Ohio within the past year. Makers of these systems have countered that the test settings were unrealistic. But that is not helping election officials sleep better at night.
One of the reasons e-voting systems turned out to be such a failure is that the only people involved in checking these systems were the vendors, who wanted to sell their technology, and the local election officials, who were ill-equipped to understand the security issues, says David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor and founder of the Verified Voting Foundation, a nonprofit organization pushing for the implementation of voting processes that can more easily be verified and audited. "There was a certification process in place," Dill says, "but it had very little to do with security."
Dill is the author of Attackdog, threat modeling software that can examine more than 9,000 potential ways a voting system can be attacked, including computer hacking, ballot tampering and voter impersonation. Attackdog is part of a larger effort called A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE) , which was launched in 2005 by the National Science Foundation with $7.5 million in funding. "Nothing we do now will affect the November election," Dill says. "We don't know how to make secure paperless voting."
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