BlackBoxVoting.org reports that Diebold voting machines were susceptible to changes in voting results without detection. Harri Hursti has shown that plus and minus votes can be pre-loaded onto memory cards used in an election. These pre-loaded cards report zero votes when scanned before an election, but when totals are tabulated, they show the expected altered results:
This videotaped testing session was witnessed by Black Box Voting investigators Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne, Florida Fair Elections Coalition Director Susan Pynchon, security expert Dr. Herbert Thompson, and Susan Bernecker, a former candidate for New Orleans city council who videotaped Sequoia-brand touch-screen voting machines in her district recording vote after vote for the wrong candidate.
The Hursti Hack requires a moderate level of inside access. It is, however, accomplished without being given any password and with the same level of access given thousands of poll workers across the USA. It is a particularly dangerous exploit, because it changes votes in a one-step process that will not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure, it requires only a single a credit-card sized memory card, any single individual with access to the memory cards can do it, and it requires only a small piece of equipment which can be purchased off the Internet for a few hundred dollars.
After seeing the results of a mock election to demonstrate the vulnerability, both Volusia and Leon Counties in Florida have decided to drop Diebold as a voting machine supplier. Unfortunately, there are still 1,200 locations in the US and Canada that will still use the Diebold machines. In each of these locations, there are plenty of employees with enough access to the memory cards to alter election results without detection. Physical security of the memory cards is also not high enough. The compartments that hold memory cards are protected by a plastic seal. Hursti has discovered evidence that memory cards can be reprogrammed by accessing a modem port on the back of a voting machine, without disturbing the seal.
I don’t know how Cook County handles elections. I had a punch card in the 2004 election, and it was counted by some sort of optical scanner. I do not know who manufactures those machines, but I am glad that my punch card remained as physical evidence of a vote. At least those can be counted by hand in the event of a contested electronic count. The same is not true for the Diebold machines, which do not leave a paper trail.
DuPage uses scantron-like optical scan. The big difference from scantron is the use of markers rather than pencils. It seems to me that there are some things that should be in writing. Punch cards, which are easy to spoil, are bad enough, but the electronic votes are just plain scary.
This Diebold thing is probably a serious problem, but who the hell are blackboxvoting.org and the Florida Fair Election Coalition? Do they have any credibility.