Waitone
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Perhaps Jim March can ride by and comment. I've heard of the test hack done to see if voting machines can indeed be hacked with some ease. Here is an article that describes the test and explores some of its implications. Jim March has been yelling loud and long about the dangers. Here is a picture that frankly bothers me greatly.
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_20950.shtml
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_20950.shtml
Florida: The Harri Hursti Hack and its Importance to our Nation
By Susan Pynchon
Feb 1, 2006, 06:42
[updated January 21, 2006] I was one of ten people present at the "hack" of the Leon County, Florida voting system, which took place on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 around 4:30 in the afternoon at the county elections warehouse. Leon County's voting system is the Diebold Accu-Vote OS 1.94w (optical scan).
The Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, authorized a "test" of his Diebold voting system to see if election results could be altered using only a memory card. Harri Hursti (photo at right), a computer programmer from Finland, who has been working with Black Box Voting, facilitated the test and it has come to be known as the "Harri Hursti Hack."
Following is a description of that hack and its significance for our nation, which I hope will correct much of the misinformation circulating regarding this event.
The Hack
To select which voting machine to use for the test, Ion drew a serial number of one voting machine from a container holding all the serial numbers of all the Leon County machines.
Since the test took place at the elections warehouse, all the voting machines were already stored there and the one machine, whose serial number was selected, was located and brought into the warehouse office, where it was plugged into an electrical outlet (so it could operate!). It was not networked to any other machines. We checked the serial number of the machine against the serial number that Ion had randomly selected.
Earlier, Ion had given ONE Diebold memory card to Hursti. Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne of Black Box Voting were also present at the test.
Harri had programmed the memory card that morning, in his hotel room, using an off-the-shelf crop scanner. I drove Harri in my car from the hotel to the warehouse. When we arrived, Harri was asked to stay outside the warehouse office where the central tabulator is located, so that there would be no question about whether he had had any access to the central tabulator. When the randomly-selected voting machine was brought into the warehouse office, all of us went into the warehouse office except Harri, whom we could see sitting in a chair on the other side of a plate glass window separating the office from the rest of the warehouse.
Ion ran a complete mock election. He had had actual paper ballots pre-printed with the following question:
"Can the votes on this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?"
There were two possible answers: "Yes" or "No," with an oval to the left of each answer to be filled in by the voter.
Everything was conducted as in a normal election. Ion first printed a "zero tape" (a poll tape from the machine that is supposed to show that nothing has been altered before the election begins). This was the first step in the hack --the zero tape showed zero votes for both the "Yes" answer and the "No" answer, even though Harri had altered the memory card and votes had been subtracted from one answer and added to the other answer. Harri used the interpreted (executable) code to cover up the fact that he had changed the vote counters.
Then eight of us voted, filling in the oval on our paper ballot. Six of us voted "No," the election could not be hacked. Two of us voted "Yes," it could be hacked. Then, one by one, we inserted our ballots into the voting machine. Ion checked after each voter to make sure that the counter on the machine was counting properly as each ballot was inserted. So, we ended up with an accurate count of 8 ballots cast on the screen on the front of the voting machine. Then Ion placed an "ender card" in the machine to end the election and printed the poll tape.
Instead of two "Yes" votes, the poll tape showed seven "Yes" votes.
Instead of six "No" votes, the poll tape showed one "No" vote.
Harri did not just flip the votes, as he wanted to show how easy it was to change the totals completely.
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