|
Examiner Editorial - Leaving a paper trail to follow |
|
09Feb'06
So now it's just the money that's preventing Maryland State Elections
Administrator Linda Lamone from requiring paper records of all elections? That's
funny. Last year Lamone was insisting that a paper trail wasn't necessary
because Maryland's Diebold electronic touch-screen voting machines were
tamperproof and secure. That was before Dec. 13, when an election supervisor in Florida allowed
a hacker to change voting results on a Diebold optical scan machine,
something that wasn't supposed to happen. Ever. When the integrity of
the election system is dependent on the integrity of a single
individual, we're all in trouble.
In a Dec. 23 letter to Diebold CEO Thomas Swidarski, Lamone reportedly
asked for an explanation of the Florida test in which Harri Hursti, a
Finnish computer programmer, successfully hacked into a non-networked
Diebold machine from outside the warehouse in Leon County where the
test was being conducted. In a maneuver now know as the Hursti Hack, he
managed to change two "Yes" votes to seven and six "No" votes to one.
Significantly, test participant Susan Pynchon noted that the paper
ballots also cast "were the ONLY evidence" available to discredit
Hursti's vote tampering.
Diebold spokesman David Bear later told reporters that Hursti only got
in the system because the supervisor was not following proper
procedures, but the Takoma Park-based TrueVoteMD reported that Diebold
has admitted to Pennsylvania officials that hackable code can be found
on the memory cards of all its machines. California officials have
already decertified Diebold's touch-screen machines, as federal law
requires that election systems be impervious to tampering by both
outsiders and insiders.
The Maryland House of Delegates is now considering a bill sponsored by
Del. Sheila Hixson, D-Montgomery, to require Lamone to do what she
should have done a long time ago: keep a paper record of all voting
results, which is essential in any recount. However, pointing to a new
study by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, that found it
would impossible to do this by the September primaries, Lamone told
members of the House Ways and Means Committee last week that keeping a
non-electronic tally would be too expensive and burdensome to consider.
Johns Hopkins computer science professor Avi Rubin, who has
studied the subject in-depth, told legislators that totally secure
electronic voting does not exist, as anybody with a rudimentary
knowledge of computer science already knows. But after spending $56
million to purchase the Diebold machines despite numerous warnings,
Maryland's top elections official is now willing to sacrifice public
confidence in the electoral process to save money? How much would it
cost to print up paper ballots to use in conjunction with - and to
verify - the electronic results?
Twenty-seven states require a paper trail and Maryland should make
haste to do so as well. Blackboxvoting.org, one of the first to alert
the public of the dangers of electronic voting machines, also reports
that Maryland voting system examiner Brit Williams may have been
"prohibited from revealing voting system flaws to the public" due to a
"nondisclosure agreement" with Diebold. The public has a right to know
if this is indeed the case.|
Computer experts warn that memory cards used in Diebold machines can
easily be preloaded with untraceable negative and positive votes,
allowing unscrupulous individuals to literally hijack an election. This
is unacceptable, and so far, a paper audit trail seems to be the only
way to prevent it. |
