The Blue State

E-Voting machines are not safe

Back in the days of the X-Files and Under Stage 2: Dark Territory (you know, the 1990s!), the thought of hacking into government databases seemed too fictional to ever worry about.  Today, as we move one step closer to having every precinct in the country using electronic voting machines, a new study surfaced that indicates how elections may soon be subjected to hacker-based fraud.

Here is part of a Wednesday morning Washington Post column.  This is pretty alarming:

To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team ofcybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state calledPennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson andJohnny Adams. It's the year 2007, and the state uses electronic votingmachines.

Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3percent of the vote. Adams's conspirators thought, "How easily can wemanipulate the election results?"

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concludedin a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with asophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the softwarethat runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

The report,which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New YorkUniversity's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the mostauthoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questionsabout the security of electronic voting.

The report concludedthat the three major electronic voting systems in use have significantsecurity and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most ofthese vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed votingrecords to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paperrecords of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.

"Withelectronic voting systems, there are certain attacks that can reachenough voting machines . . . that you could affect the outcome of thestatewide election," said Lawrence D. Norden, associate counsel of theBrennan Center.

This gives us something else to worry about besides GOP operatives removing voters from the rolls.  Each time you send a letter to your elected representatives, urge election reform.  Tell them that there needs to be a paper trail for every vote.

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Other blogs writing about this issue: Election Law, Blog Curry, Snow Deal, You Can Feed, Plush Life.

Basic lessons about voting still have not been learned in Ohio

Even after all the scandals that plagued the vote in Ohio in 2004, the 2006 primary election that was held on Tuesday demonstrated that the Republican Governor and the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio still have yet to take our institution of "one person one vote" seriously:

Election officials had trouble printing ballot receipts, findinglost votes and tabulating election results in Tuesday's primary. Someelection workers were late or did not show up at all in Cleveland'sCuyahoga County, the state's largest. Others could not figure out howto turn on the machines.

"Ohio's quickly getting this reputation as most corrupt and maybe most incompetent," said Chris Link, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which fielded dozens of complaints from voters.

BlackBoxVoting.com is a voter advocate site that has been up and running ever since the Ohio's embarrassment in 2004.