From the link at RawStory:
A top CIA cybersecurity expert told the US Election Assistance Commission last month that most electronic voting systems are insecure, according to transcripts obtained by McClatchy Newspapers.
The comments, by CIA expert Steve Stigall, are sure to fuel a new wave of anxiety over electronic voting. Stigall said any voting machine connected to the Internet could be easily hacked, and that while numerous US states have banned voting machines from having wireless capability, some machines can have the cards installed without officials being aware.
More over the bump ...
If you go to the link at McClatchy, it's really quite funny, because the focus is on America's "enemy", Hugo Chavez, and how "some say" he may have cheated in a recent election using these same techniques:
WASHINGTON — The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering.
Appearing last month before a U.S. Election Assistance Commission field hearing in Orlando, Fla., a CIA cybersecurity expert suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies fixed a 2004 election recount, an assertion that could further roil U.S. relations with the Latin leader.
Uh ... how about the elephant in the room, McClatchy? If Hugo did such a thing, he learned it from the Americans, who pioneered the use of e-voting machines, and using them fraudulently.
The articles goes on:
Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.
Interesting. I've never heard of the "Election Assistance Commission". It sounds like an agency that might be interested in actually helping (assisting, right?) the country insure we have honest and accurate elections, right? Well, apparently not.
The commission has been criticized for giving states more than $1 billion to buy electronic equipment without first setting performance standards. Numerous computer-security experts have concluded that U.S. systems can be hacked, and allegations of tampering in Ohio, Florida and other swing states have triggered a campaign to require all voting machines to produce paper audit trails.
Oh, so this commission sas set up during the Bush years. Okay. It's all starting to make sense now ... The same people who brought you the "Clear Skies Initiative" and "Healthy Forests Initiative" brought you the EAC as part of the "Help America Vote Act".
The Help America Vote Act specifies that EAC commissioners are nominated by the President on recommendations from the majority and minority leadership in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.
So we have Bush to thank for not just this Commission, but also its four Commissioners. And Bush set this up in order to give States over a billion dollars to buy voting machines ... that could be hacked in order to steal elections. Nice work if you can get it.
Here's an interesting tidbit from Bradblog about the EAC:
The EAC's current Chair, Donetta Davidson, seems to have a long, storied and increasingly well-documented history of silence concerning electronic voting machine test laboratory problems and has been an active partner with EAC Executive Director Tom Wilkey --- whose roll in this mess we've examined in detail in previous articles (here, here and here to link to just a few of our reports in this continuing series) --- in keeping the public uninformed about failures in the secret test labs.
Wilkey is at the center of the controversy surrounding a failure to disclose to both the public and election officials around the nation that CIBER, Inc.,, the country's largest so-called "Independent Test Authority" (ITA), was banned last summer from further testing of voting machines. As previously reported by The BRAD BLOG, Wilkey kept test lab problems hidden from public scrutiny for years in his earlier duties at the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) where he was in charge of monitoring and qualifying the labs.
No surprise there, for those of us cynics who try to follow this stuff.
So why was this CIA expert testifying at the EAC? Well, it looks like it's all about villainizing Hugo Chavez once again, ratcheting up the anti-Venezuela rhetoric, and creating more scary boogeymen around the world for all of us to HATE HATE HATE and FEAR FEAR FEAR so (let's face it) we'll support more military spending and more surveillance and more of what makes America so great.
It's really hilarious when the article states:
Electronic voting systems have been controversial in advanced countries, too.
And then almost completely avoids mentioning the United States of America.
Yes, it's only other countries we should fear. Never our own.
And yes, I know, Obama won, so this isn't a problem. It will never be a problem. What people do in other countries would never be done here.