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Will the election be hacked

A few weeks after Election Night 2002, Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer who lives in a northeastern suburb of Atlanta, Ga., began fearing demons lingering in the state voting machines. The midterm election had been a historic one: Georgia became the first state to use electronic touch screen voting machines in every one of its precincts. The 51 year old Jekot, who has a grandmotherly bearing but describes herself as a computer geek, was initially excited about the new system.

thought it was the coolest thing we could have done, she says.

But the election also brought sweeping victories for Republicans, including, most stunningly, one for Sonny Perdue, who defeated Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democrat, to become Georgia first Republican governor in 135 years, while Rep. Saxby Chambliss upset Vietnam veteran Sen. Max Cleland. The convergence of these two developments the introduction of new voting machines and the surprising GOP wins began to eat away at Roxanne Jekot. Like many of her fellow angry Democrats on the Internet discussion forums she frequented, she had a hard time believing the Republicans won legitimately. Instead, Jekot began searching for her explanation in the source code used in the new voting machines.

What she found alarmed her. The machines were state of the art products from an Ohio company called Diebold. But the code which a friend of Jekot had found on the Internet was anything but flawless, Jekot says. It was amateurish and pocked with security problems. expected sophistication and some fairly difficult to understand advanced coding, Jekot said one evening this fall at a restaurant near her home. But she saw hodgepodge of commands thrown all over the source code, an indication, she said, that the programmers were careless. Along with technical commands, Diebold engineers had written English comments documenting the various functions their software performed and these comments my hair stand on end, Jekot said. The programmers would say things like doesn work because that doesn work and neither one of them work together. They seemed to know that their software was flawed.

To Jekot, there appeared to be method in the incompetence. Professional programmers could not be so sloppy; it had to be deliberate. specifically opened doors that need not be opened, Jekot said, suggesting the possibility that Diebold wanted to leave its voting machines open to fraud. And, ominously, the electronic voting systems used in Georgia, like most of the new machines installed in the United States since the 2000 election, do not produce a trail every vote cast in the state midterm election was recorded, tabulated, checked and stored by computers whose internal workings are owned by Diebold, a private corporation.

Jekot was particularly alarmed and outraged to learn that company CEO Walden O is one of the GOP biggest fundraisers in his home state of Ohio and nationally. Right after the Georgia elections, an O e mail began making the rounds of Web logs and other Internet sites that were tracking the Diebold security flaws, in which the CEO bragged that he to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year. What better way to deliver electoral votes for President Bush, some reasoned, than to control the equipment Americans use to cast their ballots?

believe that the 2002 election in Georgia was rigged, Jekot insists today. don believe that Saxby Chambliss or Sonny Perdue how much is a hermes handbag won their races legally.

Despite Jekot technical expertise, officials in Georgia consider her theories baseless. Roy Barnes, the defeated Democratic governor, says that blaming his loss on voting machines is And, to be sure, there is no evidence proving malfeasance, and there probably never will be. The only trouble is, the state cannot furnish any definitive evidence to show that the 2002 election was not fraudulent. Proving that the machines didn malfunction, or that they weren hacked, is impossible. And since scores of computer scientists say that voting systems are vulnerable to attack, and because activists have raised legitimate concerns about election equipment vendors politics and processes, Jekot fears have come to seem, to many, entirely reasonable.

Even a self described Christian arch conservative, former Diebold systems manager Rob Behler, says the company failed to adequately test its troubled equipment and balked when he warned them of widespread problems with the machines. Last summer, computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University found major security flaws in the Diebold machines, concluding that the Georgia system falls below even the most minimal security standards. And in January, experts at RABA Technologies, a consulting firm in Maryland, discovered additional failures in that state Diebold systems. Internal Diebold e mail shows that company engineers knew about the problems and in some instances chose to ignore them.

Some elections officials are beginning to see the profound dangers inherent in this process; California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has ordered that all systems in his state implement a paper record by 2006. Activists hailed Shelley decision as evidence that he understands the fundamental principle at stake: Elections should be sacrosanct.

But on Election Day this November, more than 20 percent of American voters will cast their ballots on paperless electronic machines; voters across the nation will encounter them during the primaries. Critics of touch screen systems point to the controversy surrounding the vote in Georgia as a sign of things to come nationally. If there an upset in a close presidential race, will we be able to trust it? Ironically, the paperless systems were supposed to restore trust in a democracy that saw the presidency hang by a few thousand chads in Florida three years ago. In Georgia, and increasingly across the nation, Different hermes bag fake they in danger of doing quite the opposite.

Many in Georgia dismiss Jekot and her Web based acolytes as blinded partisans, conspiracy nuts, or even

But if you dismiss Roxanne Jekot as a wack job, you still have to deal with her friends. Jekot represents only the most strident quarter of an emerging national movement aimed at slowing the spread of the kind of touch screen systems that were first used in Georgia. While the movement counts as members some of the most shrill partisans on the Web, it also includes some of the most well regarded computer scientists in the world and together, these groups have been unexpectedly successful in changing the national perceptions of touch screen machines.

Until just about a year ago, these systems were considered the natural replacement to the punch card machines that so roiled the last presidential election. The new machines are easy to maintain, they can accommodate multiple languages, they can be imitiaton hermes bags used by people with disabilities, and they have the backing of influential groups like the League of Women Voters and the ACLU. The Help America Vote Act of 2002, which doles out a total of $650 million in federal money to state and local officials who upgrade their aging voting systems, has already prompted dozens of counties and a handful of states to deploy the touch screen systems.

The activists have upended the process. Fear of the voting machines is now a red meat issue not just for online lefties but also for libertarians, for many on the right, and, increasingly, for the establishment. National newspapers run Op Eds on the issue, network news shows feature the movement proponents, and officials like Shelley, in California, have been pressed to change their positions on the systems.

If you spend much time in the world of the activists, you understand why. In the fall, I sat with Jim March, an anti Diebold tech expert in Sacramento, Calif., while he showed me on his home PC how to steal an election. March, an ardent libertarian whose apartment is decorated with political posters Prefer an Unarmed Populace, one announces spent months investigating security flaws in touch screen systems. Thanks to his network of fellow geek activists, he found flaws in the system Diebold used to tally election results, a program called GEMS. The GEMS software runs on a standard PC that usually housed in a county election office. The system stores its votes in a format recognizable by Microsoft Access, a common office database program. If you got a copy of Access and can get physical access to the county machine or, some activists say, if you discover the county number and call into the machine over a phone line the vote is yours to steal.

While I sat at his computer, March helped me open a file containing actual results from a March 2002 primary election held in San Luis Obispo County, Calif. a file that March says would be accessible to anyone who worked in the county elections office on Election Day. Following March direction, I changed the vote count with a few clicks. Then, he explained how to alter the log, erasing all evidence that we tampered with the results. I saved the file. If it had been a real election, I would have been carrying out an electronic coup. It was a chilling realization.

The person who discovered the problems with the GEMS program she singularly responsible for almost every bit of attention recently paid to electronic voting machines, and for almost every juicy detail uncovered about the vote in Georgia is a middle aged publicist turned investigative journalist in Seattle named Bev Harris. Harris began thinking about voting machines in late 2002, when, after reading some claims on the Web that the election equipment firms were being infiltrated by foreign nationals, she decided, almost on a lark, to investigate the matter.

Harris had no journalistic experience, but she always harbored fantasies of uncovering something big. She turned out to be exceptionally talented at reporting. Within a few weeks of her investigation, she dug up many compelling nuggets. She found, for instance, that in the early 1990s, before he was elected to office, Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican, served as the president of American Information Systems, the company that built most of the voting machines used in his state. Harris also discovered that Diebold, the firm that produced the machines used in Georgia, had left the software used to run its systems on a public server online. Harris downloaded these files and looked through them. She saw that she had the company source code as well as several other curiously named files one, for example, was called

Before Bev Harris found the files used in Georgia, the software in the machines had essentially been secret. When the computing public got a peek at the files Harris found, experts were not kind.

In July, a team of four computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University announced that they uncovered major security flaws in the machines used in Georgia elections. analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts, the team wrote. Diebold has long boasted that votes in its system are stored in an encrypted manner, hidden to anyone who didn have a valid password; the computer scientists found that Diebold programmers left the to decrypt the votes written into the code, which is a bit like locking your door and placing the key on the welcome mat. The Hopkins/Rice scientists also said that they saw no adequate mechanism to prevent voters from casting multiple ballots, viewing partial election results, or terminating an election early.

On Jan. 19, a team of computer scientists working with RABA Technologies set up a red team exercise a one day attempt to hack into Diebold machines configured as they would be on Election Day. They were successful. In a short time, the hackers managed to guess the passwords securing the voting system, allowing them to cast multiple ballots. They found that with a standard lock pick set, they could inconspicuously open up each machine sometimes in less than 10 seconds and remove or attach various pieces of hardware, letting them erase or change replica hermes handbags outlet electronic ballots. They concluded that Diebold touch screen machines contain security risks, and they suggested that Maryland put in place stringent safeguards before its March 2 primary, and that the state overhaul the system before the presidential election.

Diebold fiercely disputes that its technology is vulnerable to attacks. Mark Radke, a spokesman for Diebold, says that the RABA study pointed out some areas in which Maryland could improve its voting procedures, and he pleased that Maryland is instituting those changes. As for the Hopkins study, Radke says the scientists who looked at the system erred in their assessment by examining only a small bit of the code and by neglecting the and balances that occur in an actual election. He pointed to a study of the company system that was performed by Science Applications International Corp., a consulting firm, at the behest of the state of Maryland. The SAIC report gives Diebold a clean bill of health, and Georgia officials say it proves their system is safe. (The study is available here in PDF format.)

There is no evidence that someone tampered with the votes in Georgia. But certainly it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone could do so in the future. The history of American democracy is replete with allegations of vote fixing and stolen elections from Rutherford Hayes disputed victory over Samuel Tilden in 1876 to Illinois in 1960 (there were vote fraud allegations against both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy) to the Florida debacle in 2000. Leaving the security of such a crucial government function in the hands of private companies motivated primarily by a desire to make a quick buck seems like a loopy idea to many people. And the more one listens to the activists complaints about how Diebold does business, the more one comes to understand their worries about election security.

Bev Harris says that in August, a former employee at Diebold handed her a trove of documents from the company, representing years of discussions on an internal company Web site. In one e mail, Ken Clark, a programmer at the company, acknowledges that vote data can be viewed with Microsoft Access, but he says that fixing the problem will be difficult, and it would be easier to feel out the testing labs and out what it is going to take to make them happy. In another e mail, Clark recommends to his co workers that if the state of Maryland which has also purchased the company touch screen machines decides to require a paper trail in its voting systems, the company should exact a high price for the required upgrades. Diebold should charge Maryland the yin, Clark wrote. In yet another e mail, Clark does an impression of how voters in Georgia might react to touch screen machines: votin thingamajig sure looks purdy, he writes. office. While the company concedes that the memos are authentic, it disputes Harris claim that the files came from a Diebold employee. Instead, says Mark Radke, Diebold computers were hacked. The firm initially threatened to sue people who posted the files on the Web, but it has backed off that threat.)

In the spring of 2003, Harris received an e mail that read, think I may be the Rob in rob georgia. The message was from Rob Behler, a laid off telecom worker who found a contract job at Diebold Atlanta warehouse in the summer before the midterm election. Behler, a friendly fellow in his 30s who speaks with a disarming Southern drawl, paints a disastrously unflattering picture of the company that provided his state with its voting equipment. He told Harris that his time at Diebold was marked by confusion and chaos, a month of 16 hour days in which he did nothing but fix broken machines, broken management techniques, and deal with incompetent people.

On his first day on the job, Behler, who had never worked on election systems before, was promoted to a manager position and put in charge of the team assembling, testing and deploying all of the voting machines in the state. He says that when he checked the machines that employees had been assembling for months, he discovered that large numbers of them were defective.

During the few weeks that followed, Behler spent his time fixing the machines. He says that each time he discovered a new problem with the systems, he would call up the tech experts at Diebold, and they would determine a way to fix it. we just tell them we updating? Behler wondered in the meeting. like, no, no, no, no, you can do that. It has to be certified. And I say, So we don want them to know that we fixing a problem? So I was like, we can tell them that we doing a quality check and that we making sure that they all the same. And that exactly what we did.

The Wall

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