URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/opinion/31SAT1.html
The New York Times January 31, 2004
TODAY'S EDITORIALS
How to Hack an Election
Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting
technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections.
Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer
security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little
trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines'
vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that
more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with
voter-verified paper trails.
When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there
was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen
machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were
vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on
the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil the
safeguards and interfere with an election.
They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they
reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote
multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting
terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw
and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote
location.
Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist,
but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem
almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have
identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by
any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making
duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved
unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in "approximately 10
seconds."
Diebold, the machines' manufacturer, rushed to issue a
self-congratulatory press release with the headline "Maryland Security
Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March Primary."
The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so
positively. Their report said that if flaws they identified were
fixed, the machines could be used in Maryland's March 2 primary. But
in the long run, they said, an extensive overhaul of the machines and
at least a limited paper trail are necessary.
The Maryland study confirms concerns about electronic voting that are
rapidly accumulating from actual elections. In Boone County, Ind.,
last fall, in a particularly colorful example of unreliability, an
electronic system initially recorded more than 144,000 votes in an
election with fewer than 19,000 registered voters, County Clerk Lisa
Garofolo said. Given the growing body of evidence, it is clear that
electronic voting machines cannot be trusted until more safeguards are
in place.
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