Election officials have insisted that machines can't be remotely compromised because they're not "connected to the Internet." But security experts point out crucial ways in which they are.
In 2011, the election board in Pennsylvania's Venango County - a largely rural county in the northwest part of the state - asked David A. Eckhardt, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to examine its voting systems. In municipal and state primaries that year, a few voters had reported problems with machines "flipping" votes; that is, when these voters touched the screen to choose a candidate, the screen showed a different candidate selected. Errors like this are especially troubling in counties like Venango, which uses touch-screen voting machines that have no backup paper trail; once a voter casts a digital ballot, if the machine misrecords the vote because of error or maliciousness, there's little chance the mistake will be detected.
Eckhardt and his colleagues concluded that the problem with the machines, made by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), was likely a simple calibration error. But the experts were alarmed by something else they discovered. Examining the election-management computer at the county's office - the machine used to tally official election results and, in many counties, to program voting machines - they found that remote-access software had been installed on it.
Electronic vote-taking is the new "wild west" of the electronic world, with well-healed companies that have political connections and influence rushing poorly documented and insecure software into production to grab a share of a very lucrative market.
In one case I saw reported, Computer Science professionals who had been given access to one vendor's software were astonished at the lack of routine protections and accountability tools, in an application that could corrupt the very idea of democracy.
Which brings up an interesting question: does anyone else ever wonder whether George W. Bush's daddy had a backdoor into the voting machines used in Ohio?
Bill Horne Moderator