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ES&S Voting Machines Can Be Calibrated to Switch Votes
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by Erik Larson | November 12, 2008 at 12:38 am
100 views | 15 Recommendations | 2 comments
ES&S DRE electronic voting machines can be calibrated to make a vote for one candidate switch to another. Obama won the election, but if it's possible to for votes to be switched, the electoral process is not secure. In a close race, an election could be stolen or "accidentally" miscalibrated and no one would be the wiser.
Touchscreen voting machines at the center of recent vote-flipping reports can be easily and maliciously recalibrated in the field to favor one candidate in a race, according to a report prepared by computer scientists for the state of Ohio.
At issue are touchscreen machines manufactured by ES&S, 97,000 of which are in use in 20 states, including counties in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Colorado. The process for calibrating the touchscreens allows poll workers or someone else to manipulate specific regions of the screen, so that a touch in one region is registered in another. Someone attempting to rig an election could thus arrange for votes for one candidate to be mapped to the opponent.
"If one candidate has a check box in one place and a different candidate has it in a different place, you can set it up so that if you press on one candidate it gets recorded for another candidate," said Matt Blaze, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who led one of three teams that co-wrote the report (.pdf) last year. "But if you press on the other candidate, it gets recorded correctly for that candidate. You can make it work perfectly normally in most of the screen, but have it behave the way you want in small parts of it."
ES&S is the same company that got Chuck Hagel elected twice, while he had ownership and contrary to the way the polls were going before the election. Scoop: Senator Hagel Admits Owning Voting Machine Company
Do you think it's acceptable for a democratic republic with the resources of a superpower to be conducting elections on easily hackable, notoriously unreliable, secret and unnaccountable black boxes? Especially when funny things have happened in elections where they're used?
See these problems still going on in Alaska where Republicans Ted Stevens (convicted felon) and Don Young (under criminal investigation) were behind in the polls, yet declared the winner in a Diebold "election". At first it appeared to be a historically low turnout, but it's now being reported that 90,000 ballots have not been counted.
Alaska's New Numbers: Still Very Stinky
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 07:13 on November 12th, 2008
To answer your question, no, I don't think it's acceptable.
(One could just keep republishing a voting-machine-hackability story each week, and that story would remain accurate: such is the reliability of these companies' unwillingness to deal with their compromised products)
at 11:48 on November 12th, 2008
"the reliability of these companies' unwillingness to deal with their compromised products"
Right, Jordan- their machines don't give results consistent with voter intent, but the manufacturer's position is consistent. Glad you agree elections should be fair and honest- i think the will of the People, in addition to being sovereign, is an extremely valuable resource- how can our societies find the best way in the world, when we're being governed by illegitmate pretenders? It's amazing so much good still results, even with these parasites inserting themselves into our affairs.