[lbo-talk] NYT Editorial: How to Hack an Election

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Jan 31 10:43:33 PST 2004


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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