Vote For Us, We'll Vote For You

The election you steal may be your own. The continuing adventures of Harri Hursti, Herb Thompson and friends. NYTimes (05.12.06), via Digby:

"With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem. 'It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system,' said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is an examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania, where the primary is to take place on Tuesday." New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems

Believe it or don't, Diebold says it's not a big deal. "Officials from Diebold and from elections' offices in numerous states minimized the significance of the risk and emphasized that there were no signs that any touch-screen machines had been tampered with." On the other hand, "computer scientists said the problem might allow someone to tamper with a machine's software, some saying they preferred not to discuss the flaw at all for fear of offering a roadmap to a hacker." "'This is the barn door being wide open, while people were arguing over the lock on the front door,' said Douglas W. Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, a state where the primary is June 6." A Diebold representative said, "'For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,' he said. 'I don't believe these evil elections people exist." Ahhh, how refreshingly naive. "Four times over the past year [2005], [Leon County, Flordia, supervisor of elections, Ion] Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques." How unsophisticated? Ha!! "PC cards can be reprogrammed by a laptop, and Diebold's memory cards can be rewritten by a $500 scanner used to measure crop moisture. Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti used such a crop scanner to retool Diebold memory cards and both add and subtract votes on a Diebold optical scan machine in Leon County, Fla."