Study highlights electronic voting concerns
A major new report on electronic voting has concluded that the three most common types of electronic voting machines are all vulnerable to software attacks.
The study by the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that a single person with technical knowledge could alter the outcome of an election by tampering with the software. The study is considered the most comprehensive ever done on electronic voting machines. The report calls for electronic voting machines to produce voter-verifiable paper records, a ban on wireless components on all voting machines, new safeguards to detect software attacks, as well as routine audits.
The study listed more than 120 security threats affecting U.S. electronic voting machines.
It says most of the machines, which were installed following the 2000 presidential election, ‘pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections,’ reports USA Today.
The yearlong study was done for the think tank by a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts. The task force examined optical scanners and touch-screen machines with and without paper trails, which will account for 80 percent of the voting machines used in this November`s election.
To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It’s the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines.
Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams’s conspirators thought, “How easily can we manipulate the election results?”
The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.
The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting.
The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.
Among the findings, the study said even electronic systems that use voter-verified paper records are subject to attack unless they are regularly audited. It also said most states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect software attacks.
With billions of dollars of support from the federal government, states have replaced outdated voting machines in recent years with optical scan ballot and touch-screen machines. Activists, including prominent computer scientists, have complained for years that these machines are not secure against tampering. But electronic voting machines are also much easier to use for disabled people and those who do not speak English.
Voting machine vendors have dismissed many of the concerns, saying they are theoretical and do not reflect the real-life experience of running elections, such as how machines are kept in a secure environment.
“It just isn’t the piece of equipment,” said David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, one of the country’s largest vendors. “It’s all the elements of an election environment that make for a secure election.”
“This report is based on speculation rather than an examination of the record. To date, voting systems have not been successfully attacked in a live election,” said Bob Cohen, a spokesman for the Election Technology Council, a voting machine vendors’ trade group. “The purported vulnerabilities presented in this study, while interesting in theory, would be extremely difficult to exploit.”
Task force chairman Lawrence Norden said there has been no documented case of hackers attacking the voting machines but warned similar attacks have occurred on computerized gambling slot machines.
At yesterday’s news conference, the push for more secure electronic voting machines, which has been popular largely on the left side of the political spectrum since the contested outcome of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, picked up some high-profile support from the other side.
Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines. Howard Schmidt, former chief of security at Microsoft and President Bush’s former cybersecurity adviser, also endorsed the Brennan report.
“It’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,’ ” Davis said of an attempt to manipulate election results.
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