Still Lots of Questions to Be Resolved.
Security of Paper Trail Heats Up Again as New Security Vulnerabilities Come Forward
May 18, 2006
Takoma Park, MD, Yesterday State Elections Administrator
Linda Lamone made her second attempt at obtaining e-pollbooks.
The attempt was again thwarted over confusion over the functionality of
the electronic pollbooks and conflict between the Governor and General
Assembly about election reforms, and the failure to put in place a
voter verified paper ballot.
During the hearing Lamone told Governor Ehrlich and the Board of Public
Works that electronic pollbooks do update in real-time. However in a
letter she sent to the State Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp. She stated “ The
electronic poll books only use the data from MDVOTERS – they are not
networked to, integrated with, or a part of MDVOTERS.” However she
stated at the Board of Public Works Meeting today that they update real
time. It would be good if the Administrator could explain how exactly
the E-pollbooks update without being networked with the Voter Database.
The second and more important issue is the Administrators claim that
TrueVoteMD has been "fear mongering” with these security hacks
discovered last week.
For the record TrueVoteMD had nothing to do with the report published
by Black Box Voting that first brought these serious security holes to
the media, and was not once quoted in the press in discussions of this
problem. The fact that one of the Administrators allies in the
E-Voting movement, Computer scientist Michael Shamos has stated that
this is a potentially severe problem telling the NewStandard on May 17:
“Diebold has "a history of not paying attention to security."
Shamos had been a big supporter of e-voting even testifying against
paper trail activists in an ongoing Maryland lawsuit. Indeed, across
the country leading computer security experts have been sounding the
alarm over the new security vulnerability. Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins
University said: ‘‘I challenge the state board of elections to find a
single computer scientist to say that these machines are now safe,” he
said Monday. ‘‘This is just more justification to get rid of these
machines.”
“We are not the ones raising these concerns,” said Alex Zeese of
TrueVoteMD, “ we just are watching the meltdown, listening to the
computer experts like Avi Rubin, Hari Hursti, and we’re urging the
State to take immediate action to remedy the problem before this
September's primary vote.”
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