http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=452972&host=3&dir=70 -
"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the programme was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."
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Readers of the uber-geek website Slashdot.org, along with other sites catering to the technically minded, have been exposed to learned debates about the security, accuracy and efficiency of electronic voting systems (really just PCs in a can running dedicated software) for quite some time.
My own geek opinion is that the use of this tech for voting, as presently implemented, is now and forever will be a catastrophe of endless possibilities for manipulation and questionable results.
Unless a national voting machine standard is created, developed at both the software and hardware level independently of well-heeled screw-ups like Microsoft and Diebold, reviewed by security professionals, tested for inevitable bugs etc, all under the harsh light of public scrutiny using open source methodologies, the scale of sham voting in the US will increase by orders of magnitude. To believe otherwise is to place faith in the integrity of the powerful.
Alarmist? Yes. Alarm is warranted.
DRM
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