Is Election Software EVER Safe?

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It appears from these articles from the Palm Beach Post....No It Is Not! Florida STILL can't get it right. This is a 3 part series from the Post.



Voting machines: Full of defects, easily hacked

800,000 lines of code: Can an election be stolen?

Computer security expert Matt Blaze was nervous.

It was 2007, and in California, three dozen computer scientists were preparing for a special project. The assignment from the secretary of state: Peer into the secret workings of the state's four major voting machine systems.

Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania professor, was leading one of the teams examining Sequoia equipment. His eight-person group was charged with poring through the system's source code - the instructions, written in computer programming language, that lay out how the system works. The mission: See how hard it would be to steal an election.

Reviewing source code is no easy task. No method detects all software bugs. Source code can be hard to follow, especially if it's written badly. A trained engineer can understand perhaps 100 lines of code an hour, the team estimated. The Sequoia system's code was more than 800,000 lines long, written in 10 programming languages. It might take a year just to read.

They had six weeks.

And so Blaze was worried. What if they couldn't find anything? Given the project's difficulty, they could miss a weakness that someone with bad intentions might exploit.

His fears were unfounded. By their six-week deadline, they had produced a 100-page report. "Virtually every important software security mechanism is vulnerable," they wrote.

Despite state oversight, vote-counting errors abound

Harri Hursti may be the best-known hacker you've never heard of. Largely unknown to the voting public, the Finnish computer programmer gained national notoriety among elections officials in 2005 when he broke into voting equipment in Leon County - at the supervisor of elections' invitation - just to show it could be done.

Hursti has since gone on to examine voting systems for other states. His conclusion: "Some systems are better than others, but none is nearly good enough."

In fact, a decade's worth of Florida vote counting has been tripped up by technology of all makes and models, despite a state certification process designed to guard against such problems. Nationally, studies of the secret code underpinning election software have uncovered an array of troubles.

The stakes are high. "These are fundamental constitutional rights," said Candice Hoke, associate law professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and a founding director of the Center for Election Integrity. "It's not a matter of 'oh well, the technology didn't work this time.' The right to vote is not participation only; it also is the right to have the vote counted as cast."

Time and time again, that hasn't happened:

*In Union County in 2002, voting machines read both Democratic and Republican ballots as Republican. The error was caught. The vendor paid for a recount.

*In Broward County in 2004, under certain circumstances, equipment from Elections Systems & Software could not count beyond about 32,000 votes in a precinct. After hitting that total, it started counting backward.

*In Sarasota County in 2006, approximately 17,800 undervotes, in which voters had not made a selection in a tight congressional race, triggered allegations of problems with ES&S' iVotronic machines. Investigations followed, and some critics say the incident never has been adequately explained.

*In Hillsborough County in 2008, a Premier Elections Solutions system computer server crashed when early voting results were fed into it. In 2010, memory cards there failed; a spokesman for the supervisor of elections said the company admitted error in that instance.

"The best software written by the wealthiest companies is buggy because software is really hard to get right," said Douglas W. Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa and co-author of Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?

"It's not the kind of thing you blame on one vendor."

When it comes to voting systems, *I have sort of adopted the X-Files philosophy:
TRUST NO ONE.*.....Ion Sancho...supervisor of elections Leon County Florida

Peace

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From the voting machines article....

At the same time, a second group, called the "red team," was trying to break into the system in a lab, hunting for a way to take over the machines. The team succeeded - seven times.

SEVEN TIMES that's so serious, my vote won't really count here in Florida. All someone with large funds has to do to win an election is strategically hack key states and they could win a presidential election. :shock:

Peace

mikepegg44

g under p wrote:

From the voting machines article....

At the same time, a second group, called the "red team," was trying to break into the system in a lab, hunting for a way to take over the machines. The team succeeded - seven times.

SEVEN TIMES that's so serious, my vote won't really count here in Florida. All someone with large funds has to do to win an election is strategically hack key states and they could win a presidential election. :shock:

Peace

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... WY#t=4209s

around 1:10:00 in