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the expert reviewers reported that all of the voting systems studied contain serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities, which attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes Among the machines New York is nonetheless still considering purchasing (Diebold and Sequoia), the California reports specifically stated: the Sequoia Source Code Review Team found significant security weaknesses throughout the Sequoia system, the nature of which raise serious questions as to whether the Sequoia software can be relied upon to protect the integrity of elections; and the Sequoia Source Code Review Team found that the Sequoia system lacks effective safeguards against corrupted or malicious data injected into removable media, especially for devices entrusted to poll workers and other temporary staff with limited authority, with potentially serious consequences including alteration of recorded votes, adding false results, and, under some conditions, causing damage to the election management system when the corrupted or malicious data is loaded for vote counting. The Sequoia Source Code Review Team found that while in certain cases, audit mechanisms may be able to detect and recover from attacks...other attacks may be difficult or impossible to detect after the fact, even though very rigorous audits, and even with procedural safeguards in place and strictly observed that the Diebold software contains vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to install malicious software on voting machines and on the election management system, which could cause votes to be recorded incorrectly or to be miscounted, possibly altering election results the Diebold system is susceptible to computer viruses that propagate from voting machine to voting machine and even voting machines to the election management system, which could allow an attacker with access to only one voting unit or memory card to spread malicious code, between elections, to many, if not all, of a county's voting units: and Since many of the vulnerabilities in the Diebold system result from deep architectural flaws, fixing individual defects piecemeal without addressing their underlying causes is unlikely to render the system secure. Systems that are architecturally unsound tend to exhibit "weakness-in-depth" - even as known flaws in them are fixed, new ones tend to be discovered. In this sense the Diebold software is fragile. Improvements to existing procedures may mitigate some threats in part, but others would be difficult if not impossible to remedy ............ Consequently we conclude that the safest way to repair the Diebold system is to reengineer it so that it is secure by design. It doesn't get more damning than that! Government's Primary Responsibility Is to Secure and Protect Our Rights: So Why Is New York State Still Considering Purchasing Voting Machines Which Have Been Exposed as Incapable of Securing a Fair Election? The Legislature in New York has declared2 that government is the public's business and indeed it is. A business that is about to spend millions of tax payers dollars on computer equipment and permit the public's elections to be run on the computer equipment it buys, must at a minimum educate itself as customers and potential users of computer technology. As the last state in the Union to have determined what our next electoral system should be, the state's failure to recognize the grave errors committed by those public officials who trusted that the vendors knew what they were doing and left it to them to decide, amounts to misfeasance. So who in NY is making these decisions and what do they know? This Is No Way to Run a Business – Especially Our Business Our legislators and appointed county election commissioners have heard the vendors assure them of the integrity of their products, but have failed to look at the evidence of these products' abysmal performance record. The vendors have misrepresented their voting systems across the country. In six short years they have peddled their shoddy voting systems throughout the nation leaving in their wake millions of disenfranchised Americans. How many of New York's decision-makers know the thousands of examples in which these electronic voting machines failed to count votes, failed to tally the votes correctly, broke down during elections, switched votes, counted votes that were never cast, reversed election outcomes? How many appreciate the budget-breaking consequence owning these machines will have on taxpayers after the first year? This abdication of responsibility and abuse of the public trust must not be tolerated. What will it take to stop New York from playing the fool and purchasing the same inferior, shoddy, insecure equipment that caused Secretary of State Bowen to remark, "Things were worse than I thought. There were far too many ways that people with ill intentions could compromise the voting systems without detection" and Avi Rubin, Professor of computer science at John Hopkins, to proclaim, "The studies show that these machines are basically poison". As the last state to make a decision about our electoral system, New York can not say it did not know! New York Law Prohibits the State from Entering into Contracts with "Non-responsible" Vendors
www.re-media.org Andi Novick Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media www.re-media.org
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