You don't need to worry about Kucinich asking for a recount in South Carolina. There won't be one, because, in essence, there can't be one. The state uses a paperless touch screen system that makes recounts an exercise in reprinting electrtonic tallies.
This is what Edward Felten, head of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. Felten is talking about the ES&S iVotronic, the paperless system used statewide in South Carolina:
"Even if you don’t think anyone would try to steal an election, this should still scare you. A machine with so many design errors must also be susceptible to misrecording or miscounting votes due to the ordinary glitches and errors that always plague computer systems. Even if all poll workers and voters were angels,this machine would be too risky to use."
In a recent diary, I noted that South Carolina's primary will depend on the reliability of the less than reliable iVotronic. Ohio's recent review of voting systems found that the system is worse than we thought.
The academic team found that the iVotronic's internal memory can be accessed, and its firmware compromised, by a person using magnet and personal digital assistant - see page 69 of the pdf (page 51 of the physical document):
Anyone with physical access to polling station PEBs can easily extract or alter their memory. This requires only a small magnet and a conventional IrDA-based palmtop computer (exactly the same kind of readilyavailable hardware that can be used to emulate a PEB to an iVotronic terminal). Because PEBs themselves enforce no passwords or access control features, physical contact with a PEB (or sufficient proximity to activate its magnetic switch and IR window) is sufficient to allow reading or writing of its memory. The ease of reading and altering PEB memory facilitates a number of powerful attacks against a precinct's results and even against county-wide results. An attacker who extracts the correct EQC, cryptographic key, and ballot definition can perform any election function on a corresponding iVotronic terminal, including enabling voting, closing the terminal, loading firmware, and so on.
How difficult would potential attackers find it to actually do this?
Page 22 of the academic report pdf (document page 4):
"The review teams were able to subvert every voting system we were provided in ways that would often lead to undetectable manipulation of election results. We were able to develop this knowledge within a few weeks. However, most of the problems that we found could have been identified with only limited access to voting equipment. Thus, it is safe to assume that motivated attackers will quickly identify - or already have- these and many other issues in these systems. Any argument that suggests that the attacker will somehow be less capable or knowledgeable than the reviewer teams, or that they will not be able to reverse engineer the systems to expose security flaws is not grounded in fact."
Yesterday, Colorado's Republican Secretary of State decertified the iVotronic for use in the 2008 elections.
This is the machine that will count the votes in priamry crucial to momentum and fundraising for candidates in both parties.
What to do? Contact the candidates and tell then to throw a Hail Mary and ask South Carolina to use paper ballots instead. They may have to do a hand count, and ordinarily it would be insane to ask for it. But is it acceptable to have an insecure, unverifiable primary?
Sign the MoveOn petition for paper ballots and audits by November 2008. The petition will be delivered to local, state, and federal officials. Let them know that an audit that is transparent, observable, and that takes place at the end of a reliable chain of custody is essential to ensuring the confidence of voters and the integrity of our elections.