Bev Harris's BlackBoxVoting Finds Voting Scan Machines Hackable
By Matthew Cardinale
www.OpEdNews.com
Two new and startling discoveries announced by Bev Harris and
BlackBoxVoting.org indicate that Diebold Optical Scan Machines are
vulnerable to, and designed for, hacking that would modify the
results of an election.
Whereas Touch Screen voting machines have received the most
attention, she asserts, Optical Scanning Machines pose as much cause
for concern based on recent findings.
In an interview for the progressive news community, Bev Harris, 53,
explains in detail the recent developments.
Harris asserts that her technical experts found, in research
conducted publicly on Leon County, Florida, elections machines, that
both the individual machines [which produce the poll tapes] as well
as the Central Tabulator were hackable.
"This is really the most important thing," Harris said. "Yes we can
hack the poll tapes [and the Central Tabulator]. But what we've
learned is there is a 'built-in' [on the individual machines] that
provides the mechanism to hack any election on the poll tapes in the
Diebold Optical Scan System."
"It is something that should be looked at in a Congressional
Investigation," Harris said.
"It's probably not an accident," Harris said, "because you can look
back through the source code to see that [Diebold] went through some
programming contortions to keep this thing there. It had to have
been expensive for them, frankly."
"When we saw the way they designed it [the Â'built-in']," Harris
explained, "Harri [Hursti, computer expert] said 'We have the Holy
Grail.' The Elections people are very concerned," Harris said.
Hursti is said to have confirmed that the built-in hacking program
Â'lived'
in the memory card of the "ballot box" on individual election
machines, according to Harris. "What this means is that the program
operates on the votes. You can change what's on there; it's just a
disk," Harris said.
"So when the Optical Scan Machine asks it to count the votes,
instead of using its own program to count the vote, it asks the
ballot box how it should count, and that is what's so bizarre,"
Harris explained.
Ion Sancho, the Leon County Supervisor of Elections, reportedly
allowed Harris and her experts to conduct a number of testing and
auditing operations on their Diebold Scanning Equipment in recent
months.
"Mr. Sancho is famous for his integrity and openness," Harris said.
"We wanted to get a county with an Optical Scan System so we could
prove once and for all if they're vulnerable."
A series of demonstrations were held on February 14, May 02, and May
26, 2005, in Leon County Elections Offices, she said.
With U.S. Representatives Corinne Brown (D-FL) and Cynthia McKinney
(D-GA) on hand, Dr. Herbert Thompson, a Professor of Computer
Science, took less than five minutes to "hack" a Central Tabulator
in the second public audit on May 02, 2005, Harris asserts.
"[Election officials] loaded up an actual election. Elections are
saved as a file. And [Dr. Thompson] went in and had his way with
it," Harris said.
"The second time they'd put in additional security measures,
unbeknownst to us, and he got in even faster," Harris said. "And
[U.S. Rep.] Corrine Brown said, can you make it so it changes, say
one in every 5 votes? And [Dr. Thompson] was like, no problem! And
she said, it IS a problem!"
It was after discovering problems with the Central Tabulator, that
the BlackBoxVoting Team turned their attentions to the individual
scanning machines.
Calls to the offices of Rep. McKinney and Rep. Brown were not
immediately returned Friday afternoon.
The canvassing procedure with optical scan machines has three
elements, Harris explains. First, there are the Scantron-like
ballots which are locked in a box. Second, there are the polling
tapes, or receipts, that come out of each voting machine, which give
results for each machine. And third, there is the Central Tabulator,
or one machine that polls all results and prints.
"And they check the [latter] two and call it good," Harris said.
"Now how hard is it to make false results by Â'taking out' the two so
that they'd match? If you can manipulate the poll tape and the
central tabulation system, that will be all she wrote for most
elections," Harris said.
"My question was, can you [hack the machines] in a way that wouldn't
be detected. And the answer we found is yes, absolutely."
"We proved it by going down there," she said. On May 26, 2005, "We
made bogus memory cards. We put them on the machines. And the cards
told the voting machines how to come out. It proved the memory card
was controlling the machine and not the other way around," Harris
said.
"We used real election results from Leon County. We simply re-wrote
the program on the card, and we manipulated the recording of the
voting. It would flip em, it would do different things, and the
results came out wrong," she said.
"Everybody is like, oh, paper ballots, we can check them if we need
to, but that's not a true statement. That's the big distraction."
Harris cites a number of cases where recounts of the actual ballots
were not allowed by state officials.
"I've been interested a long time in Diebold Optical Scanning
Systems.
Because a lot of times you go where the silence is, the thing that
everybody isn't talking about. There was an orchestrated rush
towards Anti-Touch-Screen, but what's going on with optical scans,
which have been in use for a decade?"
"There have been changes in the law, erosions state after state,
that it's becoming difficult to check paper ballots against the
optical scan total,"
Harris said.
Diebold's computer program is written in ABO basic, a new language
written by Diebold. "They made up their own computer language!"
Harris said.
"Which is a flat-out violation of all FEC standards. It's completely
against federal law not to use standard language."
What's more, Harris said, "These machines have been tested and
certified at least a decade, each time a new version comes out. What
is their excuse for passing this? There's no way they could've
missed it, and there's no way they could say it's legal."
What Next?
"There is a team that does fieldwork that is doing a documentary,"
Harris said.
"They got footage of when we found poll tapes in a downtown
elections office garbage," she said, referring to a somewhat
unrelated public records request incident last fall. "There were
actually two times when we found poll tapes in a garbage, and we got
the other one [at a warehouse] on tape ourselves," she clarified.
The documentary (see www.votergate.tv) is being edited in England by
Russell Michael and Robert Parillo Cohen, Harris said. "They've
[covered] tremendous stuff that's been happening all over, including
some elections in California."
"It's the use of machines in the counting process I object to. What
is needed is hand counting," she said.
"We've moved to a very important point," Harris said. "We need to
now get the complete set of memory cards used in 2004 and have them
looked at by the right experts. We need cooperative counties with
some anomalies and Diebold scanners. Someone needs to examine those
memory cards to see if they were misused in 2004," she said.
"I'd like to see cards from King County, Washington; Volusia County
and Duval Counties, Florida; Du Page County, Illinois; and San
Joaquin County, California. They're required to keep them for 22
months."
Black Box Voting is said to be creating a technical report for
release in mid to late June.
Black Box Voting is still pursuing litigation with Riverside County,
California, and King County, Washington, Harris said. Harris
recently won $70,000 from Diebold-related litigation in California
and also won a recent case in Palm Beach County, Florida.
Public records from requests made after the November 2004 election
are planned to be made available on Blackboxvoting.org in coming
weeks.
"We'll also be announcing a Diebold related action next week that
should spread through the internet like wildfire," she said.
Matthew Cardinale is a graduate student, advocate, and freelance
writer at UC Irvine. He may be reached at mcardina@uci.edu.
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