I'll leave readers to ridicule my state over this. I understand the urge to do it but, frankly, I'm sick of being ashamed of my dysfunctional state. Our elections down here have seemed to go steadily downhill since '2000. But as a longtime resident, disdain for this state doesn't come easily to me. I'm more interested in concentrating on repairing our election system instead of denigrating it. The election officials I know in Southwest Florida are both adept and honest. But I digress.
Apparently, this happened in a county, sadly, all-too-familiar with election controversies in recent years; when "phantom requests" for absentee ballots were sent to Miami-Dade County Elections website (hasn't been updated lately)
Upwards of 2,500 of the aptly-named "phantom requests" for absentee ballots were sent via an undisclosed computer program, according to a report coming out of the grand jury (PDF) regarding the August 14, 2012 primary election. Software installed at the election website was able to flag the requests due to both the anomalous volume of requests, and the relatively small number of mainly foreign-based IP addresses used to send them. In turn, those flags afforded election workers the awareness to recognize and reject the requests. -- requests originating from Ireland, England, India and various others international locations. Three U.S. IP addresses were used as well.
It still is not known whether the attack targeted the system itself, (as a test) to pad the number of votes for a specific candidate, or just generally gum up the works of elections in the South Florida region.
From OPEN Channel @ NBCNews.com. (in an report written by Gil Aegerter
staff writer, NBC News)
Computer experts say the case exposes the danger of putting states’ voting systems online – whether that’s allowing voters to register or actually vote.
“It’s the first documented attack I know of on an online U.S. election-related system that’s not (involving) a mock election,” said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who is on the board of directors of the Verified Voting Foundation and the California Voter Foundation.
The Miami Herald had the original
story:
Other experts contacted by NBC News agreed that the attempt to obtain the ballots is the first known case of a cyber-attack on voting, though they noted that there are so many local elections systems in use that it's possible that a similar attempt has gone unnoticed.
Prior to this, only software glitches, voting machine failures, voter error or inconclusive evidence have produced irregularities in our election system, having made up all allegations of hacking investigated by election officials. One such investigation occurred where I live in Sarasota in Southwest Florida back in 2006, when evidence surfaced of a computer security breach by a worm that had lived (albeit dormant) for years before raising havoc with the county elections voter database. I remember not-so-fondly having to check back every couple days at the website to make sure my wife and I were still registered to vote. Unfortunately, it remains unclear whether the timing of the worm's hijinks was attached to that particular year's election.
Since that time, experts have warned election officials that attacks would start occurring more in coming years. Looks like the experts were prognosticators.
“This has been in the cards, it’s been foreseeable,” said law Professor Candice Hoke, founding director of the Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University.
More from the article:
The primary election in Miami-Dade County in August 2012 involved state and local races along with U.S. Senate and congressional contests (see a sample ballot here). The Miami Herald, which first reported the irregularities, said the fraudulent requests for ballots targeted Democratic voters in the 26th Congressional District and Republicans in Florida House districts 103 and 112. None of the races’ outcomes could have been altered by that number of phantom ballots, the Herald said.
See much more about Rivera and the 26th U.S Congressional District @ The Miami Herald (search results for David Rivera):
According to the grand jury report released in December, proxy severs that essentially make internet activity untraceable, called “anonymizers” were effective in keeping the location of the original computers secret, preventing law enforcement from figuring out who was responsible for the requests. The case was subsequently closed in January by the state attorney's office.
Much more @ the Open Channel via NBCNews.com:
Much, MUCH more @ The Miami Herald.com: