E-voting: Flawed Florida systems unsafe says Sancho

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho started testing his e-voting system earlier this year. He quickly determined that an insider, or someone who gained access to the inside, could easily manipulate vote totals.

Now, with a decision to scrap the old system in favor of a new model, Sancho has tested some more, allowing experts access to the central computer that tabulates votes in an election. The experts were able to change results and leave no trace whatsoever.

Tests show some Diebold voting machines used in Florida and elsewhere around the nation can be hacked by election office insiders to change results, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho charged Thursday.

Sancho said the tests on optical machines that scan paper ballots, conducted for his office and a monitoring group, also indicated they can be manipulated without leaving any evidence of tampering.

“This is not supposed to be possible,” Sancho said. “We did it.”

Diebold spokesman David Bear discounted the tests as unrealistic because they bypassed normal security procedures.

“If I gave you the keys to my house and I turned off the alarm and told you when I wasn’t going to be home, I don’t doubt you can get into my house,” Bear said. “But is that going to have any effect on the election? Absolutely not.”
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He was unable then, however, to test if altered results on the cards could be uploaded into his mainframe computer because he was afraid it might be contaminated. He said he performed the upload this week only after county commissioners approved his request to buy a new optical scan system from another company.

The hacked results transferred into the mainframe although Diebold had contended its software would prevent that, Sancho said.
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Bear said the tests were unrealistic because polling places and vote-counting centers are filled with observers, including representatives of both major political parties, who are watching for such tampering. Sancho said the system could be hacked by an elections staffer or technician beforehand to produce faulty results.
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Most of the debate over voting machines in Florida has focused on touch-screen computer systems because the state doesn’t require that they also spit out paper records that can be counted by hand if needed.

That makes Sancho’s tests somewhat ironic, Bear said.

“Now we’re not trusting paper,” he said. “Somebody could also steal the pencil and then you couldn’t mark the ballot.”

Paper ballots are examined only during a recount triggered when results are very close, Sancho said. He said they would never come into play if an election thief made sure the difference was larger.
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In 2003, Diebold’s then-CEO Walden W. O’Dell invited people to a fundraiser for President Bush with a letter stating he planned to help “Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.” Ohio turned out to be the state that clinched Bush’s re-election in 2004.

Here’s how a system like Leon County’s works: data is moved from individual voting machines via flash memory cards – in Leon County’s case, these machines are optical scanners which have tabulated votes at precincts. Other counties use touch screens but transfer data with similar flash cards.

The flash cards, just like the ones in digital cameras and phones, are transported to the central office and fed into the central computer. The central computer then tallies the votes and spits out a result.

Sancho’s tests show that flash cards can be altered with no trace. A person could simply pre-program the card with bogus numbers and no one would be the wiser. This has always been a much more likely scenario than someone hacking in from the outside, though media, fed by the GOP, like to present (and mock as partisan conspiracy theory) the much sexier Internet hacking scenario in which some geek breaks in through a home computer.

Diebold, the manufacturer of Leon and many other county machines, is pissed, but is offering no real defense – they are belittling the very idea of testing their equipment while screaming about licensing agreements and warning ominously that Sancho’s soon to be replaced machines could now be compromised.

And the state of Florida is not very concerned.

Ion Sancho, Leon County’s election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold’s optical-scan machines.
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The Leon County test results are likely to further fuel suspicions that the new electronic voting systems in Florida, in place since the 2002 elections, are susceptible to manipulation.

When the debate hit fever pitch before last year’s presidential election, many conservatives said questions about the machinery were a liberal ploy to undermine confidence in the voting system.
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Sancho said Diebold isn’t the only one to blame for hacker-prone equipment. The Florida secretary of state’s office should have caught these problems early on, he said, and the Legislature should scrap a law severely restricting recounts on touch-screen machines and equip them with the means of producing a paper trail.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office said any faults Sancho found were between him and Diebold.

”If Ion Sancho has security concerns with his system, he needs to discuss them with Diebold,” spokeswoman Jenny Nash said.
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Sancho said he tried to discuss the problems with Diebold, but met with resistance. On Monday, he did one final test with Hursti at the Leon County supervisor’s office, Hursti hacked the memory card to spit out seven ”yes” votes on an issue and one ”no” vote.

Then, six ”no” votes and two ”yes” votes were cast into the machine the same way voters would. Those results didn’t show up in the final tally — just the ones hacked into the card.
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”These were sold as safe systems. They passed tests as safe systems,” Sancho said. “But even in the so-called safe system, if you don’t follow the paper ballots, there is a way to rig the election. Except it’s not a bunch of guys stuffing ballots in a precinct. It’s possibly one person acting in secret changing thousands of votes in a second.”

This could all be easily solved with a paper trail. Optical scan systems like Leon County’s are preferred, but touch screens can be equipped with printers. Combine a paper trail with random audits of precincts and individual machines, comparing paper and electronic tallies, and it suddenly becomes much more difficult to rig an election.

In truth, it isn’t surprising that a dedicated hacker can break into election machines. After all, hackers have broken into computers at IBM, the Department of Defense and elsewhere.

What is troubling, though, is that the Florida Legislature and state election officials haven’t done all that they can to make sure that Florida’s elections aren’t an invitation to fraud or abuse. Florida does not require a paper trail for votes, which would give election supervisors a means to verify the accuracy of a machine count.
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At minimum, the state should require more testing of voting machines and audits of elections. Ultimately, though, the state should require that all voting machinery provide a paper trail. Banks already do that with receipts for ATM transactions. Voters deserve the same consideration.

This entry was posted on December 16, 2005 at 6:18 am and is filed under Civil Liberties, Florida, National, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.