Creating Doubt Where There Should Be None

As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security
In Controlled Test, Results Are Manipulated in Florida System

By Zachary Goldfarb
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 22, 2006; Page A06

As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself.

Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.

Sancho's most recent demonstration was last month. Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, manipulated the "memory card" that records the votes of ballots run through an optical scanning machine.

Then, in a warehouse a few blocks from his office in downtown Tallahassee, Sancho and seven other people held a referendum. The question on the ballot:

"Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?"

Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no.

"Was it possible for a disgruntled employee to do this and not have the elections administrator find out?" Sancho asked. "The answer was yes."

Diebold and some officials have criticized Sancho's experiments and said his conclusions about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems are unfounded.

What Sancho did "is analogous to if I gave you the keys to my house and told you when I was gone," said David Bear, a Diebold spokesman. As Bear sees it, Sancho's experiment involved giving hackers "complete unfettered access" to the equipment, something a responsible elections administrator would never allow.

I agree with David Bear's assessment, about Sancho's tests, but with a paper trail there would be no doubt. I am not so paranoid as to believe the Democrat paranoiacs regarding the last election, but I do agree that if it can be easily accomplished, we need to retrofit the new machines to leave a "paper trail" so that votes could be confirmed by the voter. Even paranoid Liberals should feel comfortable about their votes being counted.


Full Story: Some Voter Concerns are Legitimate

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