A report issued by a consulting firm hired by the state of MD shows that the voting machines purchased for statewide use this year are flawed and are not secure. A choice quote from the
Washington Post article this morning:
Removable memory cards inside the machine can be tampered with if a lock is picked or if one of thousands of keys is stolen. If hackers find the phone number of the central computers used to compile vote totals, they could easily break into the system and tamper with results or introduce worms and viruses, said consultant Michael A. Wertheimer, a former National Security Agency analyst.
"You are more secure buying a book from Amazon than you are uploading your results to a Diebold server," said Wertheimer, recommending several changes to increase security.
The team assigned to attack the voting machines found many holes and found it relatively easy to tamper with the machines and change vote counts.
The New York Times reported:
In addition, they said, communications between the terminals and the larger server computers that tally results from many precincts do not require that machines on either end of the line prove that they are legitimate, an omission that could allow someone to grab information that could be used to falsify whole precincts worth of votes.
And the server computers do not have the latest protection against the security holes in the Microsoft operating systems, and they are vulnerable to hacker attacks that would allow an outsider to change software, the group found.
The authors of the report also said smart cards that are shipped with the system for voters and supervisors to use during elections have standard passwords that are easily guessed.
The consultants issued several recommendations but did not go as far as to recommend a paper trail for every single vote. There is, however, a bill before the Marlyand State House that would require paper records so that a manual recount could be performed. House Bill 53 calls for not only a voter-verifiable paper trail, but also a random sampling of 2% of the vote to ensure that the electronic vote counts match the paper printouts. Currently the bill only has two sponsors, but I hope that the report issued yesterday will get more delegates supporting this bill.
If you live in Maryland and you want to know that your vote was counted I suggest you contact you local state rep and ask for their support on House Bill 53. You can find out who your reps are here. There is also a Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland which has some relevant information.