California’s Electronic Voting Systems Easily Hackable
One of the reasons I helped elect Debra Bowen as California’s Secretary of State in 2006 was because of her promise to carefully look into the security and reliability of the myriad electronic voting systems deployed across this state. Having heard about security problems, and having been witness to malfunctioning machines myself, I was not at all comfortable with the assurances of elections officials when they said the electronic systems were perfectly fine.
Well, a newly released report from the Secretary of State’s office has found that four of the systems in use are not secure from hacking at all. In fact, security seems to have been an afterthought (if a thought at all) to the system makers- in this case, Diebold, Sequoia, Hart InterCivic, and ES&S.
Now I’ll grant you that the teams doing the research had access to a lot of company information about the systems and a lot of time to work things out, but others have shown how Diebold’s system could be hacked, and they weren’t given any system info from the company. And frankly, there’s a lot of time between elections- so would be hackers and election hucksters could likely prepare and be ready to alter any election they feel like where electronic voting systems are deployed.
The report (released late last week) is now being assailed by the companies that make them and the counties that purchased them as being “unrealistic, worst-case scenario” testing, but as I explained above, that really isn’t the case for a motivated hacker. And frankly, the rush to install electronic voting systems nationwide following the 2000 elections speaks of too many greased palms and too little due diligence.
Secretary Bowen now must take the obvious next step and decertify these systems, despite the wasted expense to taxpayers. Perhaps some counties can use the study to show they deserve a refund on the falsely represented systems.
Can someone remind me again why we moved away from paper and ink?
<tag> electronic+voting+systems, California+voting+machines, Debra+Bowen, Diebold+fraud, election+fraud, hacked+voting+machines </tag>