John Nichols: California Decides on Electronic Voting

[marmar]

from The Nation:


BLOG | Posted 08/03/2007 @ 11:18am
California Decides on Electronic Voting
John Nichols


Along with Minnesota's Mark Ritchie and Ohio's Jennifer Brunner, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen was elected last year on a promise to restore integrity to the electoral processes of a nation where legitimate concerns about the reliability of electronic voting machines had shaken confidence in the certainty that cast votes will always be counted votes.

Today, Bowen will decide whether the largest state in the nation will allow the use of any electronic voting machines in next February's presidential primary next February. Many county election officials in California want to use the machines because it makes their jobs easier. Unfortunately for the local officials who want to use the machines, however, their argument has been severely undermined by the news that University of California-Berkeley researchers have successfully hacked their way the voting machine that had been certified for use in California.

According Bowen, who asked the UC researchers to attempt the entries as part of a top-to-bottom review of election systems, the team of official hackers was able to bypass security in every single machine they tested.

The team, which had access to relatively easily obtainable source codes, succeeded in accessing the internal components of some machines by simply unscrewing screws. The team had little difficulty loading malicious firmware which, members explained, could then be used to manipulate election results and access election management systems.

In report prepared for Bowen by the UC researchers, the computer specialists argued in particular that Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines are not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election. The report points out that an attacker with access to just one machine could alter the outcome of an election using viruses. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=219778