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

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

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/AR20060121
01051.html
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