Voting machines won't be retested, state officials say (Florida)
State elections officials aren't ready to re-examine electronic voting machines -- even after a supervisor reported hackers could rig votes on some machines.
BY MARC CAPUTO
mcaputo@herald.com
TALLAHASSEE - Top computer scientists and voting experts said Thursday that Florida must re-examine the way it tests voting machines and needs to verify claims by a Tallahassee elections official who said hackers could alter some computerized election results. But acting Florida Secretary of State David Mann, whose office oversees the state elections department, said Thursday that he has such ''confidence'' in his agency's certification process that he has no intention of doing any double-checking right now.
At the center of the controversy: Leon County's elections chief, Ion Sancho, a nonpartisan maverick who's determined to avoid the 2000 Florida elections' debacle that led lawmakers to mandate the very computerized voting systems he is now questioning. Over the past six months, Sancho gave two computer hackers access to his optical-scan voting machines, in which voters cast fill-in-the-blank ballots. Attacking different parts of the system from the inside, the hackers said they were able to easily bypass security codes, make losing candidates win, add or subtract voters -- and do it without leaving a trace.
On Tuesday, Sancho officially dumped the voting machine system made by Diebold Elections Systems in favor of another made by Election Systems & Software. ES&S also manufactures Miami-Dade and Broward's ATM-like touch-screen voting machines, which experts say also could be vulnerable to attacks from advanced insider-hackers. A Diebold spokesman said Sancho's test was bogus. Including Monroe, 29 counties use Diebold's touch-screen and opti-scan machines. The reports from the Leon County hackers, especially the most recent from Finnish computer scientist Harri Hursti, raised red flags in the small world of computer-security and voting experts.
''The most important thing is that these claims not be ignored,'' said Ronald L. Rivest, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who's known among colleagues as one of the world's most influential computer cryptographers.
Link Here
BY MARC CAPUTO
mcaputo@herald.com
TALLAHASSEE - Top computer scientists and voting experts said Thursday that Florida must re-examine the way it tests voting machines and needs to verify claims by a Tallahassee elections official who said hackers could alter some computerized election results. But acting Florida Secretary of State David Mann, whose office oversees the state elections department, said Thursday that he has such ''confidence'' in his agency's certification process that he has no intention of doing any double-checking right now.
At the center of the controversy: Leon County's elections chief, Ion Sancho, a nonpartisan maverick who's determined to avoid the 2000 Florida elections' debacle that led lawmakers to mandate the very computerized voting systems he is now questioning. Over the past six months, Sancho gave two computer hackers access to his optical-scan voting machines, in which voters cast fill-in-the-blank ballots. Attacking different parts of the system from the inside, the hackers said they were able to easily bypass security codes, make losing candidates win, add or subtract voters -- and do it without leaving a trace.
On Tuesday, Sancho officially dumped the voting machine system made by Diebold Elections Systems in favor of another made by Election Systems & Software. ES&S also manufactures Miami-Dade and Broward's ATM-like touch-screen voting machines, which experts say also could be vulnerable to attacks from advanced insider-hackers. A Diebold spokesman said Sancho's test was bogus. Including Monroe, 29 counties use Diebold's touch-screen and opti-scan machines. The reports from the Leon County hackers, especially the most recent from Finnish computer scientist Harri Hursti, raised red flags in the small world of computer-security and voting experts.
''The most important thing is that these claims not be ignored,'' said Ronald L. Rivest, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who's known among colleagues as one of the world's most influential computer cryptographers.
Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 9:11 AM
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