Posted on 11/04/2006 2:21:06 PM PST by calcowgirl
Days before the election, state officials have learned that California's most widely used electronic voting machines feature a button in back that can allow someone to vote multiple times.
Several computer scientists said Wednesday that the vulnerability found in all touch-screen machines sold by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems was not especially great because using the yellow button for vote fraud would require reaching far behind the voting machine twice and triggering two beeps.
"If the machine beeps loudly and someone has their arms wrapped around the machine, the poll workers are going to become suspicious," said David Wagner, a computer security and voting system expert at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It's kind of hard for me to see how this could be used very widely," he said. "It's retail fraud, so it's onesies and twosies and can only affect very close races."
A former poll worker in Tehama County tried alerting state elections officials to the vulnerability about a month ago and said he was told the problem did not seem significant. Ron Watt then obtained poll worker-training documents through a public records request and brought them to the attention last Friday of the state's chief voting systems tester.
On Monday, state elections officials issued a caution to the more than one-third of California counties that use Sequoia equipment, including Santa Clara County, where the touch screens are the primary voting system, and Alameda County, which relies on almost 1,000 machines as a secondary voting system intended for disabled voters. State elections officials reminded the counties to keep a close eye on the machines and post warnings that tampering with election equipment is a crime.
"All counties confirmed that they had implemented security measures, and they were aware of it," said Susan Lapsley, assistant secretary of state for elections.
Some counties were backing the machines up against walls; others were roping off the rear of the machines, state officials said.
"You can't do it surreptitiously," said Guy Ashley, spokesman for the Alameda County Registrar of Voters. "You have to know what you're doing.
"We train our poll workers to keep their eyes peeled, stay on the lookout for stuff like this. We think that will suffice."
Recognition of a potential new security problem that requires no knowledge of special passwords or access to the inner workings of a voting machine revives questions about the effectiveness of state and national evaluations of voting systems.
Twice earlier this year, computer experts and critics of electronic voting have discovered profound vulnerabilities in Diebold touch screens that allow someone with a few minutes of access to a machine to alter or replace its core software and load votes into it undetected.
Debate about the security and reliability of electronic voting has been central to the race for secretary of state, and Sequoia's yellow button became instant fodder Tuesday night in back-to-back radio interviews with Republican appointee Bruce McPherson and his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Debra Bowen, now neck-and-neck in the polls.
McPherson has said California's certification of voting systems is the nation's toughest and most stringent and he has certified several electronic voting systems for the November elections, including the Diebold and Sequoia touch screens.
Bowen has pointed to numerous findings of security problems by computer scientists and argued that electronic voting systems are not mature enough to be trusted in elections.
"And just this morning we learned that the Sequoia machine will allow a voter to vote multiple times if they do something very simple, which is to hold a button in the back down for three seconds," she said on a Los Angeles radio show Tuesday night, adding that McPherson's office "must have known" about the vulnerability for some time.
"No, that is not true," McPherson replied later in the same show. "That is not true. I think she is throwing a lot of fear and doubt out there, and it's unwarranted."
Sequoia's yellow button isn't a hack or flaw. The button has been a feature on Sequoia's mainline AVC Edge touch screens for years, designed as a backup for the typical method of voting on the machines.
In most counties, poll workers use a separate machine to activate a card that a voter inserts into the touch screen in order to retrieve the proper ballot. The yellow button is for counties that can't afford the separate machine or for cases when the card activator becomes inoperable, as happened to Diebold systems in March 2004 in Alameda and San Diego counties and last primary in Kern County.
Pressing, then holding the button for several seconds twice and answering a screen prompt sends the machine into a "manual activation" or "poll worker activation" mode. In that mode, someone can call up one ballot after another and vote them.
"You can literally vote continuously until you are physically restrained," said Watt, the former Tehama County poll worker who reported the problem to state elections officials.
Unlike the Diebold vulnerability, he said, using Sequoia's yellow button "takes no tools."
"In 18 seconds I can switch that to manual and start voting. In 30 seconds I can train you to do it," he said.
Watt and Bowen, the Democrat running for secretary of state, say the vulnerability should have been caught earlier, before the state approved the machine for use in elections.
"You shouldn't have a reset button on the outside of the machine," Bowen said. "Certainly when I'm secretary of state I'm going to want to know if there's a button that only requires physical access to the machine to vote multiple times. And unfortunately if someone does that, you're in a position where you don't know what votes to throw out."
Computer scientists say the manual mode can be rendered inoperable in the touch-screen software, but elections officials worry that it is too close to the election to attempt and may not be useful.
"It's a feature of the machine, it's one that's necessary from a couple of different perspectives but as long as people employ security measures that are already in place then it's mitigated," said Lapsley.
But, assuming physical security, there is a tangible object which can be read by both sides.
When you bring electronic machines into it, the result is whatever the machine operator says it is.
What if the poll workers are the ones pushing the button?
I'm not worried about fraud during the actual polling time. I'm worried more about fraud before and after. If I'm the organized Party of Vote Fraud, I rig the voting before or after, not during the voting.
OH, it's going to be ugly...no doubt about it.
No kidding! This stupid company should be sued and then sued some more.
Perhaps a moderator could update the subject line to indicate this machine is made by the HUGO CHAVEZ owned company??
"These voting machines are the most accurate way to count the votes in the history of mankind."
Perhaps. But only if everyone involved has the best of intentions.
If you think anyone is capable of foul play, these machines are far more vulnerable than traditional mechanical or paper based systems.
This is simply because your typical poll worker is not capable of recognizing fraud on an electronic machine that would be obvious to anyone with older techniques of voting.
I have programmed computers professionally for 30 years. I have no faith in these machines. You will find that the faith in these machines is inversely proportional to the amount someone knows about computers, computer security and the validation of software.
Try it yourself. Find someone with even ten years experience in programming computers (not in voting machines) and ask them what they think about the machines we have today.
This is a case where "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." does not apply. Just because Dems suspect it should not make you reflexively support it.
Elections require even more transparency than criminal trials. Yet we tolerate proprietary and secret software on our voting machines. People should rightly be skeptical of such an arrangement even without the numerous exploits that have already been discovered and documented.
Current systems do not even use code signing for the executables (allowing the software to be changed without notice to anyone, compare that to installing a driver on Windows) nor do they encrypt and protect the data that is transferred as well as the browser you are using right now when you pay for a pizza on the web.
Don't take a politician's (of any stripe) word for it. Ask someone who might know.
How come we dont hear Republicans crying and moaning about the machines.
The democrats are getting ready to launch a massive fraud suit everywhere they lose. The lawyers are already counting their money.
For a party which understands national defense so well, the GOP seems to be incredibly naive about political battles sometimes.
It sometimes seems the philosophy of the GOP is "it's better to lose with dignity, than to win".
In Florida, it looked at early voting that it would be easy to pocket the voter card. Nobody was attending the table where the cards are turned in. It was self service.
ping
Just to throw a little light - RE: Chavez owns
Smartmatic International Group is owned primarily by foundations controlled by three Venezuelans -- Mugica, Roger Pinate and Alfredo Anzola. It was a small company until it beat out Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software in 2004 for a contract to provide voting technology in Venezuela. With millions in profits from that contract, Smartmatic bought Sequoia last year from a British company for about $16 million. Sequoia supplies electronic voting machines to at least a dozen states and the District.
Smartmatic representatives yesterday said that the Venezuelan government does not own and has never owned any part of the company. "No foreign government from any country has ever held a stake in Smartmatic," said the company's chief executive, Antonio Mugica.
Bizta, a start-up technology company in Venezuela with some of the same owners as Smartmatic, received a $150,000 grant from a financing arm of Venezuela's government before the 2004 recall. In exchange, Bizta pledged nearly 30 percent of the company shares and a seat on the board to the government. Bizta has been folded into Smartmatic, and Mugica said the grant, which he characterized as a loan, has been repaid. He added that a government representative never showed up at board meetings.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/30/AR2006103001224.html
WTF? Who designs these things? School kids?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, you can only get away with this kind of stuff if you're a poll worker or in cahoots with a poll worker.
At the end of the day (*), the poll workers have to reconcile the number of votes the machine says it registered with the number of signatures in the roster, plus absentee ballots handed in, etc. If those don't match, somebody down at election HQ will get involved and have to either resolve it or throw them out or something.
It's impossible that the machine will show 1000 votes and the precinct roster will have 500 signatures and that precinct's 1000 votes will be accepted.
(*) One of the few times this phrase is appropriate to a discussion, if I may say so myself.
p.s.: Standard procedure in Santa Clara county is indeed to set up the voting machines directly opposite of the table where the precinct workers (4 or more) sit. And far enough away that the workers can't see you voting but certainly within range that they would see you reaching around or walking in back of it.
A piece of cardboard, some duct tape and problem is solved on election day.
I have only one question: Does this help or hurt Republicans?
Then apply for the job. We need you in the trenches.
I don't trust all of the machines. Here in Harris County, TX we use an electronic voting machine that records each vote in 3 separate computers with sealed memories. In order to mess with the votes, you would have to break the seals on 3 computers and change all 3 in identical ways. In addition, our county is now run by Republicans. But in dim territory, I EXPECT MASSIVE FRAUD IN EVERY ELECTION. Note my posts where I have witnessed and documented successful fraud.
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