Voting Machine Fraud

[midwesterner (banned)]

Analysis finds e-voting machines vulnerable

www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-06-26-e-voting_x.htm

WASHINGTON — Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 presidential election "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections," a report out Tuesday concludes.
There are more than 120 security threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the study by the Brennan Center for Justice says. For what it calls the most comprehensive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank convened a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities.

The study, which took more than a year to complete, examined optical scanners and touch-screen machines with and without paper trails. Together, the three systems account for 80% of the voting machines that will be used in this November's election.

Among the findings:

• Using corrupt software to switch votes from one candidate to another is the easiest way to attack all three systems. A would-be hacker would have to overcome many hurdles to do this, the report says, but none "is insurmountable."

• The most vulnerable voting machines use wireless components open to attack by "virtually any member of the public with some knowledge and a personal digital assistant." Only New York, Minnesota and California ban wireless components.

• Even electronic systems that use voter-verified paper records are subject to attack unless they are regularly audited.

• Most states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect software attacks.

"There are plenty of vulnerabilities that can and should be fixed before the November election," says David Jefferson, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory computer scientist who served on the task force. "Whether they will or not remains to be seen."

The report said state election officials could improve voting-machine security if they conduct routine audits comparing voter- verified paper trails to the electronic record and ban wireless components in voting machines.

"A voting system that is not auditable contains the seeds of destruction for a democracy," says Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a chief sponsor of a bill to improve electronic-voting security.

Funny

[Tennesseer]

Midwesterner-welcome to the P&M board.

One of the rules of the CoC is to keep your posts short if you are including excerpts from articles outside this board.

Include no more than a couple of paragraphs from the article you have copied. Post the link after that should a reader wish to read more of your article.

Videos are fine but try to include only one video per post. That is not a rule but I ask only as a courtesy to other posters.

Regards,

Tennesseer/Moderator

[midwesterner (banned)]

Ok, no problem, wasn't aware.

[Tennesseer]

No problem-just a heads up for the future.

Thanks.

[Sharon]

I am in Oregon and we have not gone to a polling place in years. We are strictly vote by mail. You receive your ballot in the mail, color in the arrows using a black pen, place the ballot in the secrecy envelope and sign the back of the envelope. The envelope is different from a regular envelope in that the back flap covers the entire back of the envelope. You seal it at the top and the bottom. There are perforations by the seals. This allows the election office to remove the portion of the envelope you signed without opening the actual envelope.

I do know that all signatures are compared to the signatures on file. My Mom had a temporary job doing this for several elections.

[Deleted]

Man.. I live in AZ. Gabby Giffords and Raul Grijalva beat Jesse Kelly and Ruth McClung by a hair. Both elections went in to over time, so saying. I wonder if they used these machines?

[Deleted]

This is kind of an old article, mid. Do you know if there has been any progress on this problem?