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The National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued a nationwide review of electronic voting machines. Buried in the technical jargon of computer programmers are some alarming findings that should trigger a public outcry against touch-screen voting machines.
The NIST Voting Team provided a definition of 'voting system' that highlighted points of attack from hackers. "Equipment (including hardware, firmware, and software), materials, and documentation used to define elections and ballot styles, configure voting equipment, identify and validate voting equipment configurations, perform logic and accuracy tests, activate ballots, capture votes, count votes, reconcile ballots needing special treatment, generate reports, transmit election data, archive election data, and audit elections."
The NIST experts recommended, "All voting systems SHALL be auditable."
Defining auditability of software-driven voting machines involves "high-level auditability requirements that essentially demand that any error, whether randomly occurring or maliciously introduced, is detectable (error is defined essentially as an incorrect vote total result)."
The big news of the study comes in the form of a warning. "Note: It would have to be clear, however, that the methods for voting systems to be auditable must be highly reliable and robust, and that today's DRE [Direct Recording Electronic] voting systems would not meet this requirement."
In other words, all touch-screen voting machines in use throughout the entire country cannot detect malicious code. Hackers, using self-deleting software code, can rig voting machines without detection.
In the 2006 general election in Sarasota, Florida, thousands of votes were 'lost' in a close Congressional race on touch-screen voting machines. Despite considerable effort to find out what happened to the missing votes no final conclusion was reached. Florida election officials would not admit the machines had been hacked and concluded that voter error was to blame.
Modern election fraud, even on a massive scale, leaves no clues because of an inability to examine software when it is running a machine. If malicious code was introduced into a touch-screen voting machine by a hacker using self-deleting script, it is impossible to detect the intrusion.
The NIST investigators have warned the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which certifies electronic voting systems, that there is no protection. "Successful attacks against all voting system components may be capable of causing an undetectable change to an election outcome."
Critics of software-driven devices in polling places urge paper and pencil. The battle cry of voting machine critics is, "Hand count paper ballots in public".
Comments
When Rebecca Mercuri wrote this information about how easy it is to hack and disappear the code in touch screns in 2001, I did not understand why no one understood the serious the ease in altering touchscreen elections had become. It took the disaster in Sarasota in 2006 to show what it meant to have a vendor control an election and the people have no recourse because there were no ballots.
I hope the federal government will ban touchscreens in federal elections. I also hope that the federal government will order mandatory audits done immediately after and election is closed and reported. Minnesota is having so much trouble because ballots can be "mishandled" weeks after an election. All auditing should be done in the public view as soon as the precinct machine tally is completed and reporting to the central tabulator.
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