Sequoia Voting Systems, a major provider of electronic voting machines to the United States, has a little problem with its security. Turns out, the machines are not so difficult to tamper with--even the paper trail can be jiggered as well. Follow me below the fold for the rest of the story...
The Computer Security Group at UC Santa Barbara has a lot of interesting security projects going on--these guys are the ones you want to talk to to find out whether or not your system is vulnerable to tampering. So, in the wake of the "hanging chad" issue of 2000, where Sequoia was implicated by its own employees in a scheme to drive sales of electronic voting machines by distributing deliberately poorly made paper ballots to West Palm Beach, FL for the presidential elections (reported by Dan Rather in 2007 --redacted Wired article here.) there has been a lot of scrutiny of Sequoia Systems voting machines.
In March of 2008, Professor Edward Felten received a rather telling email from Sequoiarequiring that he cease and desist from any attempts to audit the security of their machines under threat of legal action. You might recall Prof. Felten as the person who showed how easily Diebold machines could be hacked by an enterprising and not terribly technically minded person. Prof. Felten published the email in its entirety on his Freedom to Tinker blog site. So it seems obvious that Sequoia does not welcome "unauthorized" (one is tempted to translate that as "competent" or perhaps "unbiased") auditing and testing of its machines.
Which brings us to the UCSB team. In a very thorough, one might say exhaustive report, the team shows exactly how a Sequoia Systems voting machine can be hacked before it ever gets to a polling place, using a program small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive. In fact, as the video on the site proves, there are five scenarios in which the votes can be easily switched from one candidate to the preprogrammed preferred candidate, and it clearly demonstrates that the paper receipt trail that accompanies the electronic vote is jiggered to show the false result as well. All it would take is one determined person getting hold of the voting machines before the election--and it wouldn't need to be right before, just sometime before--and the machines will make sure that no matter HOW the actual votes are cast, the preferred candidate will receive the vote.
This is some chilling stuff, people. While we're all focussing on the Palin avalanche of dirt and muck, giving her the attention and diversion they need, operatives can quietly be loading malware onto the voting machines to make sure our votes don't go where we want them to go. All it takes is the MSM massaging the data to make the polls seem artificially close, using the Palin mess to show how she's "energizing the base," and "getting out the conservative vote" to muddy the waters further, and then afterwards we all sit, once again, in shocked amazement at the "close race" that resulted in yet another victory for the Rove team.
I realize this isn't as sexy as yet another "OMG, Palin is teh suxxorz!" diary with juicy details of the latest and greatest malfeasance and scandal. However, the more attention that goes to those stories and diaries, the less goes to the very real, very scary nuts and bolts methods of making sure elections go the way certain people want them to go. Republicans are very, very good at handwaving and dismissing information that ought to be damaging to them, and they are incredibly good at disinformation campaigns that paint people like the UCSB Security Team and Prof. Edward Felten and those who listen to them as "cranks" and "crackpots" and "conspiracy theorists." The thing is, just as a paranoid can have real enemies, a "conspiracy theorist" can and often does uncover very real conspiracies. Voter fraud is a huge elephant in the room, and if we don't pay attention to it, the thing is likely to trample us flat. Just like it did in 2000. Just like it did in 2004.
We tend, as librul type smart people, to completely dismiss the Republicans as technologically incompetent because their web sites are crappy and amateurish, they can't manage a live streaming video feed of their convention and their candidate doesn't know how to "do a google." However, they know perfectly well how technology can help them out when they need it, and seeming to be stupid on the subject gives them plausible deniability--the old "Who, stupid l'il old me?" defense. This is a flaw in our thinking that we can't afford.
The Republicans have proven over and over that they're smart enough to jigger elections. We have it right in front of our noses that these electronic voting machines are pretty easy to tamper with. We need to get the spotlight out on our local security for voting machines, and question any results that seem off. Most importantly, we need a candidate who will NOT concede, no matter how convincing the evidence, until it's proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no tampering if the unthinkable happens and the election goes to McCain.
UPDATE: Okay, the video is on YouTube now, which is great because the old site was getting slammed by Slashdot traffic.
Part One:
Part Two:
If you want to download the original .MOV file, we've uploaded it to rapidshare, it's about 100MB:
Rapidshare link to video
SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION UPDATE--DIGG IT HERE!