A Pattern of Obfuscation
Back in the ’70s and ’80s, the Collier brothers endured the same media and judicial blackout of this issue when trying to expose these problems. In Votescam, they report that in 1989, the New York Times finally revealed problems associated with computerized vote tabulation:
Some critics of computerized vote counting worry about the potential for ‘trapdoors,’ ‘time bombs,’ and ‘Trojan Horses…’ Once inside the system, (a hacker) could program the computer to count votes for one candidate as votes for another.
In that 1989 New York Times article, Princeton University computer scientist Howard J. Strauss explained:
Writing the ‘source code’ for one of these vote counting systems, a programmer could insert a ‘Trojan Horse’ that might not appear for years.
Suppose I wanted to throw the 1992 presidential nomination to (Mario Cuomo, for example). I write the code so that every time the name comes up in the primaries, he receives a certain number of votes.
Today’s computer scientists have the same exact criticism for using software in public elections. They take it even further: because there can be a million lines of code, opening up the source code for review in no way guarantees that problems will be discovered.
The 2006 Princeton study of touch screen systems reiterated the same complaints:
Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss.
Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
One has to wonder why the U.S. government would give states $3.9 billion to buy easily compromised voting systems, a vulnerability known for decades.
Expert Studies Condemn Optical Scan Election Systems
Last month, I quoted several computer experts who studied the machines in use today and urge all Americans to read this 20-page summary. By no means do I cover all the reports that have come out in the last ten years, but all experts who study these systems agree: they are subject to easy manipulation. Use your find command to search the annotation for the term, optical scan, and read how optical scan systems also fail democracy.
Also note the paper by Ryan and Hoke that focuses on the GEMS tabulation system which is used in Diebold’s optical scan system. Not only are optical scans vulnerable to hack, but apparently, they were designed that way.
Many people, by now, have heard of California’s Top-To-Bottom Review of Diebold, Hart and Sequoia touch screens and optical scan systems. Cleveland State University Center for Election Integrity Chief, Dr. Candice Hoke, summarized all the findings into a two page document. In a personal email, she wrote:
I was the team leader for the TTBR Diebold Documentation assessment. The TTBR study's lead scientists provided suggestions for this short summary but it is ultimately my work. To reduce over 500 pages to two pages, at least a few important findings – especially about design flaws not relating to security issues -- had to be sidestepped.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
