Electronic Voting Firm Site Hack (Serious Issue Alert!)

Wired News ^ | 05:15 PM Dec. 29, 2003 PT | AP source

[vannrox]

WASHINGTON -- A company developing security technology for electronic voting suffered an embarrassing hacker break-in that executives think was tied to the rancorous debate over the safety of casting ballots online.

VoteHere of Bellevue, Wash., confirmed Monday that U.S. authorities are investigating a break-in of its computers months ago, when someone roamed its internal computer network. The intruder accessed internal documents and may have copied sensitive software blueprints that the company planned eventually to disclose publicly.

[vannrox]

"Given the political sensitivity to this issue, we felt it was important to get out on this," Adler said.

[Tacis]

Oh, no!!! I hope this minor inconvenience won't be used by conservatives to try and disenfranchise dead, black voters in Florida.

[George W. Bush]

The same individual may be tied to the theft in March of internal documents from Diebold Election Systems of Canton, Ohio.

Adler said the intruder accessed internal corporate documents and may have copied sensitive "source code," blueprints for software. But Adler said VoteHere planned eventually to reveal that source code, which is protected under patents, for review by outside security researchers.

Even though this VoteHere is not nearly as bad as Diebold from a security and peer-review and open source standpoint, the fact that the source has already leaked makes it more possible to study it and find a successful attack strategy.

Clearly, someone is trying to do this already.

[Gritty]

The heck with electronic voting. Use paper ballots. They leave a "paper trail" and you have to use good old fashioned fraud to steal the elections.

Count ballots by hand, just like we did for over two centuries. It's slower (not that much slower) and there is a lot less chance of stealing elections!

[supercat]

Count ballots by hand, just like we did for over two centuries. It's slower (not that much slower) and there is a lot less chance of stealing elections!

Actually, a hybrid system (combining machine-readable paper ballots with electronic tabulation but human inspection) could be best. Perhaps I should write up a white paper on a propsed method, though I doubt it would have any useful effect.