California's Secretary of State Finds all Computerized Voting Systems Sold by the Vendors Enable The Potential For Theft on a Massive Scale
New York State is about to undergo the most dramatic change to its electoral system in a century. The only options currently being considered by the state are two different computerized systems - touch-screen DREs and paper ballot optical scanners (PBOSs) – both sold by the same handful of vendors. Why is New York still considering these systems when California's Secretary of State has publicly exposed these machines for the snake oil they are?
Matt Blaze of the University of Pennsylvania and leader of the Sequoia review team for California's Top to Bottom Electronic Voting Investigation, described these systems as "fatally flawed". The sheer magnitude of the problems as revealed by last month's California's Top to Bottom independent reviews was devastating.1 They corroborate what computer scientists have been trying to tell us: that Americans have been sold a bill of goods and are now voting on computerized systems which are all easy to rig.The essential safeguards that we all agree are fundamental to any democratic voting system have been removed - obliterated by oblique computerized processes that these vendors try to hide behind. All of the vendors' voting systems were found by California's Secretary of State (SOS) to be seriously vulnerable to attacks that could change the outcome of elections:
the expert reviewers demonstrated that the physical and technological security mechanisms provided by the vendors for each of the voting systems analyzed were inadequate to ensure accuracy and integrity of the election results and of the systems that provide those results.
the expert reviewers reported that all of the voting systems studied contain serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities, which attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes
Among the machines New York is nonetheless still considering purchasing (Diebold and Sequoia), the California reports specifically stated:
the Sequoia Source Code Review Team found significant security weaknesses throughout the Sequoia system, the nature of which raise serious questions as to whether the Sequoia software can be relied upon to protect the integrity of elections; and
the Sequoia Source Code Review Team found that the Sequoia system lacks effective safeguards against corrupted or malicious data injected into removable media, especially for devices entrusted to poll workers and other temporary staff with limited authority, with potentially serious consequences including alteration of recorded votes, adding false results, and, under some conditions, causing damage to the election management system when the corrupted or malicious data is loaded for vote counting.
The Sequoia Source Code Review Team found that while in certain cases, audit mechanisms may be able to detect and recover from attacks...other attacks may be difficult or impossible to detect after the fact, even though very rigorous audits, and even with procedural safeguards in place and strictly observed
that the Diebold software contains vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to install malicious software on voting machines and on the election management system, which could cause votes to be recorded incorrectly or to be miscounted, possibly altering election results
the Diebold system is susceptible to computer viruses that propagate from voting machine to voting machine and even voting machines to the election management system, which could allow an attacker with access to only one voting unit or memory card to spread malicious code, between elections, to many, if not all, of a county's voting units: and
Since many of the vulnerabilities in the Diebold system result from deep architectural flaws, fixing individual defects piecemeal without addressing their underlying causes is unlikely to render the system secure. Systems that are architecturally unsound tend to exhibit "weakness-in-depth" - even as known flaws in them are fixed, new ones tend to be discovered. In this sense the Diebold software is fragile.
Improvements to existing procedures may mitigate some threats in part, but others would be difficult if not impossible to remedy ............ Consequently we conclude that the safest way to repair the Diebold system is to reengineer it so that it is secure by design.
It doesn't get more damning than that!
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