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Maryland Electronic Voting Systems Found Vulnerable
snoitpo writes "My fine state (Maryland) has hired some people I can respect to hack into Diebold voting machines. The Washington Post (read it free for 2 weeks) has the details. From this story and the one on NPR, the state hired a company and set up a test voting precinct and had the group try whatever they could to break into the machines. Most of the attacks would probably be noticed by an even-half-awake poll staff, but some vulnerabilities were exposed. The net seems to be that you could really mess up individual machines, but the grail would be to get to the central collection servers and send a megavote to your favorite candidate. The last paragraph mentions problems that voting machines had in the last election in Virginia; it's interesting to note that those use wireless networking--my jaw has dropped onto my keyboard and I can't comment any further." Other readers sent in two stories in the Baltimore Sun (1, 2), and one in the NY Times.
Thinking outside my Head
There is a bill before the Maryland State House that would require a voter verifiable paper trail on all electronic voting machines in the state of maryland. The bill also calls for a random sampling of the paper ballots to ensure that the electronic count has not been tampered with. House Bill 53 was just read into the ways and means committee two weeks ago but with the release of the reports I hope there it can gain more support and pass the house.
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
The NYTimes article mentioned in passing the work started Bev Harris, as described in her book ,and said that "Diebold stated that the code used by the researchers, which had been taken from a company Internet site and circulated online...". What actually happened is that supposedly private code, which no one should have been able to get to, was left in a wide open FTP server. And these are the guys we're supposed to trust with our elections. At this point I can't figure out whether Diebold's lack of security is due to malice or incompetance.
I am officially gone from
...we will never have the perfect voting system. If these electronic voting systems prove to be worse than the infamous punch-card ballots (which is what people seem to be suggesting) then electronic voting may have defeated its purpose. Maybe we should stick to the kind of ballots we have where I live in Iowa: you mark the ballot with a marker, and it gets read by computer, much like standardized tests do. It's reasonably accurate and can be counted by hand if needed, and is not so prone to hacking. P.S. - sorry if I submitted an empty comment earlier - my mistake
Send mail to atc@npr.org and express your concerns.
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist