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| | Name : | Rachel Garner | Organization : | N/A | Post Date : | 9/30/2005 |
| Comment : | (Quoted by Rachel Garner, who submitted this comment.)
CAN VOTING MACHINES BE TAMPERED WITH THROUGH ACCESS TO
PROGRAMMERS?
The Washington Post characterized Hagel's election in 1996 as the
biggest upset of the election season. At the time, voters did not
know that he owned and had held key positions with the company that
counted his votes.
But is it improper for a candidate to have ties
with voting machine companies?
Harris examines the issue of tampering security in the upcoming
"Black Box Voting" book. One of her sources, Dan Spillane, a former
Senior Test Engineer for a voting machine company, believes that the
computerized
voting machine industry is riddled with system integrity
flaws.
"The problems are systemic," Spillane says, and he contends that the
certification process itself cannot be trusted. Despite industry
characterizations that the code is checked line by line, this does
not appear to be the case. Spillane points to frequent, critical
errors that occur in actual elections and identifies omissions in the
testing procedures themselves. His own experience as a voting machine test
engineer led
him to address his concerns about integrity flaws with the owner of the
voting machine
company, who then suggested that he resign. He did not, but shortly before
a General
Accounting Office audit, Spillane was fired, and so was his supervisor,
who had also
expressed concerns about system integrity.
Election Technology Labs quit certifying voting machines in 1992. Its
founder, Arnold B. Urken, says that the manufacturers, specifically
ES&S (then AIS), refused to allow the detailed examination of code
needed to ensure system integrity. Wyle Labs refused to test voting
machine software after 1996; testing then went to Nichols Research,
and then passed to PSINet, and then to Metamor, and most recently to
Ciber.
But even if certification becomes adequate, nothing guarantees that
machines used in actual elections use the same programming code that was
certified.
Machines with adjusted code can be loaded onto
delivery trucks with inside involvement of only ONE person. To make
matters worse, "program patches" and substitutions are made in
vote-counting programs without examination of the new codes, and
manufacturers often e-mail technicians uncertified program "updates" which
they install
on machines immediately before and on Election Day.
Both Sequoia touch screen machines and Diebold Accuvote machines appear to
have
"back door" mechanisms which may allow reprogramming after votes have been
cast.
Diebold's Accuvote machines were developed by a company founded by Bob
Urosevich,
a CEO of Diebold Election Systems and Global Election Systems, which
Diebold
acquired. Together with his brother Todd, he also founded ES&S, where Todd
Urosevich
still works. ES&S and Sequoia use identical software and in their optical
scan machines.
All three companies' machines have miscounted recent elections, sometimes
electing the
wrong candidates in races that were not particularly close...(Reference deleted for privacy.) | |
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