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Touchscreen Hack Effort Called 'Monkey Business'


Critics of the Diebold touch-screen voting machines turned their attention Wednesday from the machines themselves to the computers that will tally the final vote, saying the outcome is so easy to manipulate that even a monkey could do it.

And they showed video of a monkey hacking the system to prove it.

In the minute-long video produced by Black Box Voting, Baxter the chimp is shown deleting the audit log that is supposed to keep track of changes in the Diebold central tabulator, the computer and program that keeps track of county vote totals.

Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris said the demonstration shows that the system — which will be used in more than 30 states, including Maryland — is dangerously inadequate when it comes to stopping election fraud.

But a Diebold spokesman insisted that the system is secure despite "incessant" criticism from organizations such as Black Box Voting.

"The fact of the matter is what you saw was a staged production ... analogous to a magic show," said David Bear, the Diebold spokesman.

Even if the system could be hacked, he said, it could only be done by a person with "unfettered access to the system." Bear noted that elections are not just the machines, but also the people who work the elections.

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excerpted from http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65031,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_
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But Harris said it's possible to change the voting summaries without using GEMS by writing a script in Visual Basic -- a simple, common programming language for Windows-based machines -- that tricks the system into thinking the votes haven't been changed. GEMS runs on the Windows operating system.

The trick was uncovered by Herbert Thompson, director of security technology at Security Innovation and a teacher of computer security at the Florida Institute of Technology. Thompson has authored several nonfiction books on computer security and co-authored a new novel about hacking electronic voting systems called The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency.

After Harris met Thompson at the Defcon hacker conference this year, she asked him to examine the GEMS program. He found he could write a five-line script in the Notepad text editor that would change the vote summaries in GEMS without changing the raw precinct data. The auditing log in GEMS wouldn't record the change because it only tracks changes that occur within GEMS, not changes that occur on the computer outside of GEMS.

After writing the script, Thompson saved it as a Visual Basic file (.vbs) and double-clicked it to execute it.

The command happens in the background where no one can see it. To verify that the changes occurred, Thompson could write another script to display the vote data in a message box after the change. Once the scripts finished their work, they would go into the Recycle Bin, where Thompson could delete them.

When Harris demonstrated the vulnerability to officials in California, she opened the GEMS program to show that the votes changed as the script commanded them to.

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excerpted from http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.asp?id=828
In mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio.

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excerpted from http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html
The rush to embrace computerized voting, of course, began with Florida. But, in fact, one of the Sunshine State's election-day disasters was the direct result of a malfunctioning computerized voting system; a system built by Diebold. The massive screwup in Volusia County was all but lost in all the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in South Florida. In part that's because county election officials avoided a total disaster by quickly conducting a hand recount of the more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system. But the huge computer miscount led several networks to incorrectly call the race for Bush.

The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there. Taken together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore, had won Florida and thus the White House. Election officials restarted the machine, and expressed confidence in the eventual results, which showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. After the recount, Gore picked up 250 votes, while Bush picked up 154. But the erroneous numbers had already been sent to the media.

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