[IP] How to Hack an Election (NYT Editorial: 31 Jan 04)
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From: GLIGOR1@xxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 15:23:51
To:dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: How to Hack an Election (NYT Editorial: 31 Jan 04)
January 31, 2004TODAY'S EDITORIALS How to Hack an Election
oncerned 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.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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