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Friday, October 21, 2005

Finally.
Posted by Jill | 4:26 PM

At last -- vindication for those of us who have been hollering about problems with electronic voting machines.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has issued a report finding that "some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."

Among the security problems the GAO found were:



  1. Some electronic voting systems did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, thus making it possible to alter them without detection.
  2. It is easy to alter a file defining how a ballot appears, making it possible for someone to vote for one candidate and actually be recorded as voting for an entirely different candidate.
  3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards.
  4. Access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network.
  5. Supervisory across to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords.
  6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy.
  7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail.
  8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel.


It's not just tinfoil hattery. The current crop of electronic voting machines, all manufactured by companies who are known Republican campaign contributors, are very easily rigged to keep those to whom they donate in office. Even if they were Democratic campaign contributors, this is unacceptable. We cannot go all over the world holding ourselves up as a beacon of democracy when our voting apparatus is less reliable than that of a corrupt banana republic.

Anyone who values what this country stands for, regardless of party, ought to be in favor of accurate elections.

(hat tip: Rep. John Conyers, at Daily Kos)
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