The secure storage of this junk is a costly waste, too.
I just finished dumping this story on my email lists
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1518679/posts
Vote Early, Vote Often
I have in my posession an actual butterfly ballot voting machine used in Miami-Dade County in 2000.
There are also "game-used" chads included.
The obsolete encoder isn't going to do anyone trying to rig an election any good.
The memory cards wouldn't be that hard to fabricate if someone wanted to make their own, but they are useless unless properly programmed.
Sounds like poor tracking of public assets, but not a security risk unless this went missing before the election, and there was information on it that would aid in rigging an election.
'While this equipment was not used in elections, this nonetheless underscores how important inventory control is, and we're going to undertake extra measures to ensure security,'' Handel said.
If these items were misplaced before they became obsolete and if there was some way they could have been used to fix an election (the person attempting to do so would need the proper information to program the card, and need to know the encryption key to properly encrypt the data), then it represents a security risk.
If they just didn't know how to dispose of obsolete junk, or if the memory cards could be reused with current systems, then it's a matter of poor inventory control, and negligence in selling the furniture without making sure it was empty.
But Handel has ordered an independent audit of DeKalb County's voting equipment and its security and custody procedures. And she said the State Election Board, which she chairs, will decide whether to sanction DeKalb County election officials.
Sounds like a prudent idea. I'm curious when this equipment got shoved in that desk. I've also heard enough horror stories about elections procedures to think that regular audits of procedures and checks that they are being followed are necessary.
Auditable processes are necessary because civil servants simply don't have a good track record of not getting laze and taking shortcuts that compromise security. The biggest weakness in our election security seems to be the people running them. As we try and remove the human factor, we create other security risks and also reduce transparency.
Computers do what they are programmed to do, people are much less reliable. With computers the problem is verifying what they are really programmed to do (and getting people to understand the verification process well enough to accept it). With people, you need to have auditable steps, and preferably observed auditable steps.
The secure storage of this junk is a costly waste, too.
Equipment should really only need to be kept secure after it is set up for and election, and long enough after an election to verify that it worked properly.
We should not have to rely on secure storage of machines that were not used in an election, other than to prevent theft of public property.
If there is information on the equipment that is used for training that should not be made public, the equipment should simply have it's von-volatile storage erased. That's what we do with equipment that gets removed from a secure area. If it has non-volatile memory, that memory has to be erased in a secure fashion usually involving writing random patterns to the media or memory before zeroing it out or setting it to a known pattern.