Leaving a paper trail to follow

[kster]

Examiner Editorial - Leaving a paper trail to follow
09Feb'06

So now it's just the money that's preventing Maryland State Elections Administrator Linda Lamone from requiring paper records of all elections? That's funny. Last year Lamone was insisting that a paper trail wasn't necessary because Maryland's Diebold electronic touch-screen voting machines were tamperproof and secure.

That was before Dec. 13, when an election supervisor in Florida allowed a hacker to change voting results on a Diebold optical scan machine, something that wasn't supposed to happen. Ever. When the integrity of the election system is dependent on the integrity of a single individual, we're all in trouble.

In a Dec. 23 letter to Diebold CEO Thomas Swidarski, Lamone reportedly asked for an explanation of the Florida test in which Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer programmer, successfully hacked into a non-networked Diebold machine from outside the warehouse in Leon County where the test was being conducted. In a maneuver now know as the Hursti Hack, he managed to change two "Yes" votes to seven and six "No" votes to one. Significantly, test participant Susan Pynchon noted that the paper ballots also cast "were the ONLY evidence" available to discredit Hursti's vote tampering.


Diebold spokesman David Bear later told reporters that Hursti only got in the system because the supervisor was not following proper procedures, but the Takoma Park-based TrueVoteMD reported that Diebold has admitted to Pennsylvania officials that hackable code can be found on the memory cards of all its machines. California officials have already decertified Diebold's touch-screen machines, as federal law requires that election systems be impervious to tampering by both outsiders and insiders.


http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2006/02/08/opinion/editorial/08aedit09papertrail.txt

[nicknameless]

1. K&R

[Bill Bored]

2. This is NOT how the Hursti hack was done.

He had physical possession of the memory card.

If we are going to fight e-voting, we have to get the facts straight.

The issue now is whether the software that made it possible to perform the hack is even allowed under the EAC's Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines.

Obviously if someone has physical possession of a voting system, or part of a voting system, it's possible to alter it, which is what Hursti did.

The question now is whether the design of the system violated federal guidelines.