Three new studies this week with bad news for electronic voting.
First, in Florida, Diebold voting machines were successfully hacked.
In California, Diebold, Sequoia and Hart voting machines were successfully hacked.
Meanwhile, a new report from the NYU and U.C. Berkeley law schools finds that most states which require a paper trail for electronic voting never even count them.
Finally, the American Enterprise Institute has come out against amending HAVA. Why?
In Florida:
At the request of Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Florida State University information technology laboratory went over a list of previously discovered flaws to see whether the machines were still vulnerable to attack.
The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate's votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct
The California study:
Teams of computer hackers participating in a first-of-its-kind experiment in California have succeeded in breaking into all three electronic voting machines they targeted.
The systems were invaded in ways ranging from altering votes via a laptop computer to physically breaking into an electronic ballot box with small, concealable tools, the hackers reported to the state Friday.
, although officials were quick to point out that ordinarily voting machines were kept more secure than in the trials.
"It's a big deal for many people in this country," [Secretary of State Debra] Bowen said of the hacking. "We are a democracy, and our very existence as a democracy is dependent on our having voting systems that are secure, reliable and accurate.
Meanwhile the Berkeley and NYU studies provide the most damning new evidence that the current system is not working:
Thirty-eight states, they say in a new report, require voting machines to produce "voter-verifiable paper records." But few states do much of anything to examine these paper records after an election, and none -- zero -- use procedures designed to discover evidence of election-tampering in these records.
lately many have been retrofitted with paper printers that show a voter's selection just before she casts her ballot. The voter is supposed to make sure that the print-out -- the voter-verifiable paper record -- reflects her choices.
...
But here's where the problems comes in. Of the 38 states that require paper records, 23 do not require officials to conduct any sort of audit of the records; the paper records essentially sit untouched, useless, after a race. Of the few states that do require post-election audits, "none has adopted audit models that will maximize the likelihood of finding clever and targeted software-based attacks, non-systemic programming errors, and software bugs that could change the outcome of an election," the researchers say.
This is a serious issue, they add, because there have been instances in every state "where machine malfunctions have changed vote tallies."
What is the point of requiring a paper trail if that paper trail is never looked at? There IS NO POINT. We should repeal all paper trail laws until we are confident of the ability to actually count them; at least that way voters won't be deceiving into a false sense of security.
The AEI comes out against paper trails for the 2008 Elections... Why? (Notably, the veritable think tank does not offer a single reason in defense of the security of electronic voting machines.) Their only argument is that, essentially 'it will not work; 100 million votes are too many to count'. Somehow, I think if we could count 80 million paper ballots a decade ago, we could count 100 million.