[Mb-civic] As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security
In Controlled Test, Results Are Manipulated in Florida System

By Zachary Goldfarb
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 22, 2006; A06

As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make 
sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to 
manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by 
Sancho himself.

Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break 
in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing 
results with what the specialists described as relatively 
unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the 
vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold 
Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other 
jurisdictions around the country.

Sancho's most recent demonstration was last month. Harri Hursti, a 
computer security expert from Finland, manipulated the "memory card" 
that records the votes of ballots run through an optical scanning machine.

Then, in a warehouse a few blocks from his office in downtown 
Tallahassee, Sancho and seven other people held a referendum. The 
question on the ballot:

"Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?"

Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan 
machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final 
tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no.

"Was it possible for a disgruntled employee to do this and not have the 
elections administrator find out?" Sancho asked. "The answer was yes."

Diebold and some officials have criticized Sancho's experiments and said 
his conclusions about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems are 
unfounded.

What Sancho did "is analogous to if I gave you the keys to my house and 
told you when I was gone," said David Bear, a Diebold spokesman. As Bear 
sees it, Sancho's experiment involved giving hackers "complete 
unfettered access" to the equipment, something a responsible elections 
administrator would never allow.

Questions about the security of electronic voting machines have been 
circulating widely in recent years. But many of the concerns have been 
dismissed as the fantasies of Internet conspiracy theorists or 
sore-loser partisans who could not accept that their candidates simply 
got fewer votes. Critics have not demonstrated that any real elections 
have had returns altered by the manipulation of electronic voting systems.

But the questions raised by Sancho, who has held his post since 1989, 
show how the concerns are being taken more seriously among elections 
professionals.

"While electronic voting systems hold promise for improving the election 
process," the Government Accountability Office said in a report to 
Congress last year, there are still pressing concerns about "security 
and reliability . . . design flaws" and other issues.

The questions about electronic balloting have become widespread as 
states and counties move to upgrade equipment, as required by the 2002 
Help America Vote Act. The law and new state regulations were enacted to 
make voting more accessible and more accurate, a response to the 
controversy generated by the contested outcome in Florida in the 2000 
presidential election.

Since the federal law was passed, though, a hodgepodge of federal and 
state requirements and debates over the best technology have complicated 
the task of upgrading. In a recent survey by the National Association of 
Secretaries of State, 17 of 43 states that responded said they expected 
to miss a congressionally imposed Jan. 1, 2006, deadline to upgrade 
voting systems. Election officials have repeatedly clashed with 
voting-machine manufacturers.

In Connecticut, for example, Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz said she 
would scrap her plans to replace her state's lever machines after the 
company she planned to buy from "misrepresented" itself in negotiations 
about how accessible the machines would be for people with disabilities.

In Miami-Dade County, Fla., the elections chief -- the third in five 
years -- is thinking about tossing out touch-screen systems installed 
after 2000. The concern is that they do not leave a paper trail that 
auditors could examine in a disputed election and are expensive to use.

In California, the secretary of state recently asked Hursti to 
investigate whether Diebold machines the state was considering had 
similar vulnerabilities.

The events that set in motion Hursti and Sancho meeting, and a new wave 
of concern over today's voting technologies, started in 2003, when a 
Seattle-based activist named Bev Harris released thousands of Diebold 
documents she said she found on an unsecured portion of the company's 
Web site. Some computer scientists said the documents showed Diebold's 
systems were vulnerable to attack. Today, more than 800 jurisdictions 
use their technology, Harris said.

She wanted to find a way to test whether those vulnerabilities could be 
exploited. Sancho volunteered his equipment to be tested by experts 
Harris would select.

Harris recruited computer expert Herbert Thompson, and on Feb. 14, 2005, 
in Tallahassee, Thompson met with Sancho and tried to crack the Diebold 
system remotely. The first attempt failed. On a second attempt, by 
directly accessing a computer where the votes are counted in a final 
tally, he manipulated returns. They used a local high school election 
for the experiment.

In May, two more tests were held, this time with Hursti present. Using a 
device bought for about $200, he was able to easily alter the final vote 
by changing the program stored on the memory card.

"You have to admit these systems are vulnerable and act accordingly," 
Hursti said.

Diebold took a dim view of the experiments. On June 8, a senior company 
lawyer faxed Sancho: "You have willfully and intentionally allowed the 
manipulation of memory cards related to your elections. . . . We believe 
this to have been a very foolish and irresponsible act."

The response frustrated Sancho. "More troubling than the test itself was 
the manner in which Diebold simply failed to respond to my concerns or 
the concerns of citizens who believe in American elections," he said. "I 
really think they're not engaged in this discussion of how to make 
elections safer."

He is also critical of state officials who he believes should have 
caught the vulnerabilities earlier. He said that vendors such as Diebold 
have too much influence in the administration of elections, a view that 
resonated with Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, the founder of the Miami-Dade 
Election Reform Coalition. Sancho is "truly an advocate for voters," she 
said. "What he is doing in Leon County goes completely against the grain 
of county election commissioners elsewhere, who are allowing vendors to 
dictate how to run their own elections."

Johns Hopkins University computer sciences professor Avi Rubin, who is 
leading a group that has received a $7.5 million grant from the National 
Academy of Sciences to research election technology, said the 
vulnerabilities of electronic systems -- including new touch-screen 
voting machines -- point to the need for a paper trail in any election. 
"The more I see, I say we need voting to rely on paper," he said. About 
26 states require paper ballots, according to Verified Voting, an 
advocacy group.

Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Florida's secretary of state, said in the 
end the integrity of any voting system must be protected by the local 
officials who administer elections. "Machines are designed and certified 
to operate in a secure environment and under secure procedures that each 
supervisor puts in place and follows directly," she said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/21/AR2006012101051.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060122/5f32023e/attachment.htm