Sunday, March 26, 2006
Electronic Voting Machine Skullduggery
A Florida elections official who looked a little too closely at how manipulatable the "tamper proof" electronic voting machines really are is finding that none of the three big companies who make these jewels are willing to do business with him absent an agreement from him not to rigorously test the machines.
The maverick elections supervisor in Leon County, Fla., last year helped show that electronic voting machines from one of the major manufacturers are vulnerable, according to experts, and would allow election workers to alter vote counts without detection.
Now, however, (Ion) Sancho may be paying an unexpected price for his whistle-blowing: None of the state-approved companies here will sell him the voting machines the county needs...
There are three vendors approved to sell voting equipment in Florida, and each has indicated it cannot or will not fill Sancho's order for 160 voting machines for the disabled. Already, he has had to return a $564,000 federal grant to buy the machines because he has been unable to acquire the machines yet...
The trouble began last year when Sancho allowed a Finnish computer scientist to test Leon County's Diebold voting machines, a common type that uses an optical scanner to count votes from ballots that voters have marked. Diebold Election Systems is one of the largest voting machine companies in the United States.While some tests showed that the system is resistant to outside attack, others showed that elections workers could alter the vote tallies by manipulating the removable memory cards in the voting machines, and do so without detection...
last month, California elections officials arranged for experts to perform a similar analysis of the Diebold machines and also found them vulnerable -- noting a wider variety of flaws than Sancho's experts had. They characterized the vulnerabilities as "serious" but "fixable."
"What he [Sancho] discovered was -- oops -- that the conventional wisdom was all wrong," said (David Wagner, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley), a member of the panel that reviewed the Diebold machines. "It was possible to subvert the memory card without detection."
The industry is trying to fight back. If they weren't concerned about rigorous testing, why are they so touchy about selling their product to Sancho?
A spokesman said Diebold will not sell to Sancho without assurances that he will not permit more such tests, which the company considers a reckless use of the machines...
Another company, Sequoia Voting Systems, backed out of discussions with Sancho earlier this year. Spokesman Michelle Shafer said the company lacks the capacity to fill his order.
The third voting machine company, Election Systems & Software Inc., did not respond to three calls for comment directed through their sales representative.
