[To add to the other downsides] Financial Times; Sep 12, 2003
THE AMERICAS: Security fears grow over electronic voting systems By Henry Hamman Bev Harris, a freelance writer and public relations consultant in Washington state, made a startling discovery while conducting research for a book about elections. Without trying, she stumbled upon one of Diebold Election Systems' most proprietary company secrets - the entire computer code to its electronic voting machines. Ms Harris is no cryptographer. She found the machine code for Diebold - one of the leading vendors of computerised voting equipment - using the popular Google internet search engine. She and her publisher then downloaded the entire site and had the files posted for public access on a New Zealand news site. From that site, Avi Rubin, a computer security expert at Johns Hopkins University, teamed up with two graduate students and pored through the code line by line. Their results leaked to the US media in July. Professor Rubin's report called the Diebold system "far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts", and said that reliance on electronic voting systems such as Diebold's "places our very democracy at risk". The report came at an awkward moment for Diebold. The company was about to sign a $55.6m (£34m) contract with the state of Maryland for 11,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines. Robert Ehrlich, Maryland's Republican governor, put the contract on hold and asked Science Applications International (SAIC), an IT consultant, to evaluate the Diebold system. Maryland officials are studying the 200-page report from SAIC. A spokesman for Mr Ehrlich said the state might announce its decision on whether to continue with the Diebold contract as soon as today. Tom Swidarski, president of Diebold Election Systems, said criticism of the product was "misguided", and that the company supported the SAIC review. He also complained that the code on the Diebold site was copyrighted and had been stolen. While the stakes for Diebold are high, they are even higher for the US election system as it grows increasingly dependent on computerisation. Electronic voting "could be a real nightmare if it's not watched carefully", said James Campbell, a professor of political science at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Prof Campbell said that after the Florida election crisis of 2000, so much attention went to eliminating hanging chads and butterfly ballots that politicians and election officials risked "focusing on one problem to the exclusion of more traditional problems like vote fraud and ballot security. There should be a good deal of concern about various sorts of mischief." Beyond Florida in 2000, some have raised questions about the 2002 vote in Georgia - electronic across the entire state - which yielded multiple upsets. Meanwhile, in California, which holds its recall election for Governor Gray Davis next month, scientists are warning of potential trouble if one of the 135 candidates asks for a recount. Some of the state's electronic voting machines do not provide a paper trail for independent verification. Researchers looking at electronic voting have begun to call for a slowdown. No one knows what percentage of the 2004 presidential vote will be cast electronically. Experts say more than 10 per cent of votes cast in the 2000 presidential election were electronic. Michael Alvarez, co-director of the California Institute of Technology/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Voting Technology Project, has been urging states not to rush into electronic voting, and to ensure an independent record of votes cast electronically. Other nations are using electronic voting. Brazil conducted its last election electronically, and some European countries are moving towards computerisation.
