Wednesday, July 23, 2003

With new touch screens, voting fraud is easy

By LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF GEORGIA

"A shocking new report puts Georgia in the spotlight for potential vote counting fraud," said Libertarian Party of Georgia Chairman Dr. Helmut Forren. "As a 28 year veteran computer engineer, I knew these new voting machines would be vulnerable to vote tampering, but it just floored me when I found out how terribly vulnerable they really are," he continued.

Dr. Forren was referring to two articles published by "Scoop", an Internet news-site, looking at the details of the actual software used in Georgia to tally votes for the 2002 election. The articles reveal that the security was so poor that anyone with a simple Microsoft Office program and no real hacker ability could change the vote totals ­ without detection. A real hacker could have easily made a virus and placed it in the software before the election, since the software was stored on the Internet without password protection and was easily available worldwide. (The articles are at www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HS0307/S00065.htm and www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HS0307/S00078.htm)

Georgia adopted the new system, which uses touch screen computers at polling stations, statewide last year, despite concern expressed by many in the computing industry about the lack of a paper audit trail. "But this report shows that, even with a paper audit trail, the underlying system for vote counting is completely insecure. This system cannot stay in place if Georgians are every to trust that their votes really count, or are counted correctly," said Forren.

"I was fascinated that the investigator chose to focus on Cobb County," said Libertarian Garrett Michael Hayes, who ran against Sonny Perdue and Roy Barnes for Governor last year. "In fact, Cobb County took more than 800 votes away from me over a month after the election. They explained it away as 'correcting an error.' But after reading these articles, I question that ­ especially because Cobb County made almost no public announcement of the change. Maybe this is why they were so quiet! I'm not saying the election was stolen from me, but I am asking, 'what other major security mishaps or counting errors occurred that we were never told about?'"

The second article extensively interviews a local technician working with 6,000 of the Georgia machines. He describes three last-minute software updates applied to the machines, at least one of which was downloaded from the insecure ftp site onto his laptop that he shared with other technicians. About this update, the technician says, "[He] said it did not affect the certification elements. So it did not need to be certified." Libertarians wonder if a malicious virus, in an uncertified software update, downloaded from an insecure ftp site, publicly available on the World Wide Web, would care about the certification rules?

"We are calling on the Georgia Legislature to do the right thing and scrap this fraud-prone system NOW. Concerned citizens can sign our online petition at www.404-Freedom.com," concluded Forren.