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At the National Press Club, today, Bev Harris demonstrated
how easily Diebold voting equipment can be hacked, and election results
changed. “Officials
should print up paper ballots rather than relying on touch-screen systems, and
print out vote totals in each precinct and deliver them by hand to make sure
centralized vote-counting computers are working properly”, she said. The first news report is pasted below. CAMBER Citizens for Accurate Mail Ballot Election Results 303-494-1540 www.users.qwest.net/~alkolwicz
http://coloradovoter.blogspot.com Sheila Lennon: Hacking the Presidential Election September
23, 2004 7:31
p.m. Wednesday (Blogroll)
Day off
tomorrow, back Friday. Hacking
the Presidential Election -- A Bipartisan Problem, Anyone Can Do It. That's the title of the press release for today's press
conference at And now the reports
are rolling in. More overnight, I'd expect, as reporters who were there file
for print deadlines. Reuters reports that
spokesmen for voting software manufacturers Diebold and Sequoia "said
people were unlikely to get access to make any changes, and any attempts to
alter the vote would be caught by security procedures already in place." Nevertheless, all the
campaigning, the volunteering, the time, money and effort is meaningless if the
totals are electronically altered on election night. Safeguards and paper
trails now could prevent a passel of (Politicians of all
stripes should be concerned. Hackers come in all stripes, too.) Hacking
the Vote: A Real and Present Danger: A release from the Institute for Public Accuracy
boils it down: At the National Press
Club this morning, Harris and others demonstrated methods of manipulating
vote-counting programs. Harris said: "We are able to use a hidden program
for vote manipulation, which resides on Diebold's election software. This is a
hidden feature enabled by a two-digit trigger (not a 'bug' or an accidental
oversight; it's there on purpose). Also participating is Dr. Herbert H.
Thompson, computer security expert and editor/author of 12 books including How
to Break Software Security. Thompson shows how easily an election can be rigged
by implanting a virus. Also, Jeremiah Akin, an independent computer programmer
from Activists
Find More E-Vote Flaws: The crux of it, at Wired: The vulnerabilities
involve the Global Election Management System, or GEMS, software that runs on a
county's server and tallies votes after they come in from Diebold touch-screen
and optical-scan machines in polling places. The GEMS program generates reports
of preliminary and final election results that the media and states use to call
the winners.... Harris said the
problem lies in the fact that GEMS creates two tables of data that don't always
match. One table consists of rows showing votes for each candidate that were
recorded on voting machine memory cards at each precinct. The other table
consists of summaries of that precinct data. Officials use the raw precinct
data to spot-check accuracy. For example, if all of the machines at a precinct
record a total of 620 votes for Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the data in GEMS
should show 620 votes for Schwarzenegger for that precinct. The official
results that go to the state are based on the vote summaries produced by GEMS. When election
officials run a report on GEMS on election night, it creates the vote summaries
from the raw precinct data. Then as absentee and provisional ballots get
counted after Election Day and added into GEMS, the raw data numbers increase,
while the vote summaries remain the same until the next time officials run a
summary report and it regenerates totals from the raw precinct data. Harris said it's
possible to alter the vote summaries while leaving the raw data alone. In doing
so, the election results that go to state officials would be manipulated, while
the canvas spot check performed on the raw data would show that the GEMS
results were accurate. Officials would only know that the summary votes didn't
match precinct results if they went back and manually counted results from each
individual polling place and compared them to the vote summaries in GEMS. Diebold said because
the two sets of data are coupled in GEMS it would be impossible for someone to
change the summaries without changing the precinct data that feeds the
summaries. And if they did, the system would flag the change. But Harris said it's
possible to change the voting summaries without using GEMS by writing a script
in Visual Basic -- a simple, common programming language for Windows-based
machines -- that tricks the system into thinking the votes haven't been
changed. GEMS runs on the Windows operating system. The trick was
uncovered by Herbert Thompson, director of security technology at Security
Innovation and a teacher of computer security at the Florida Institute of
Technology. Thompson has authored several nonfiction books on computer security
and co-authored a new novel about hacking electronic voting systems called The
Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency... More Diebold E-Voting Vulnerabilities: At Slashdot Politics,
pointing to the Wired story above, ...it looks like
Diebold has more to worry about now that it is possible to change votes with a
5 line VB script. 'The vulnerabilities involve the Global Election Management
System, or GEMS, software that runs on a county's server and tallies votes
after they come in from Diebold touch-screen and optical-scan machines in
polling places.'" This is followed by
hundreds of comments from the programmers who call this site home. Electronic-Vote Critics Urge Changes to System: Reuters, ...While it is too
late to fix such flaws, officials should ensure that they have a paper backup
of vote counts on every level, Harris and other activists said. Officials should print
up paper ballots rather than relying on touch-screen systems, and print out
vote totals in each precinct and deliver them by hand to make sure centralized
vote-counting computers are working properly, they said. Congress has authority
to force local officials to improve their procedures if they are reluctant to
do so, they said. But it has so far
shown little interest in voting security, and bills that would require
touch-screen systems to print out votes have failed to make it out of the
committee level. E-voting critics report new flaws: News.com covers the
demonstration and adds, Also on Wednesday, the
San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation released a kind of election guide for geeks. Complete with photographs of the
most popular models of e-voting machines, it lists their known flaws and
problems that people have had with them in the past. |