Cyber threat to voting

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A Single Person Could Swing an Election

Electronic Systems' Weaknesses May Be Countered With Audits, Report

Suggests

By Zachary A. Goldfarb

Special to The Washington Post

Wednesday, June 28, 2006; A07

To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of

cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called

Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and

ny . It's the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting

machines.

Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3

percent of the vote. 's conspirators thought, " How easily can we

manipulate the election results? "

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in

a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a

sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software

that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New

York University's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most

authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions

about the security of electronic voting.

The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in

use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it

added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing

printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states

require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require

regular audits.

" With electronic voting systems, there are certain attacks that can

reach enough voting machines . . . that you could affect the outcome of

the statewide election, " said Lawrence D. Norden, associate counsel of

the Brennan Center.

With billions of dollars of support from the federal government, states

have replaced outdated voting machines in recent years with optical

scan ballot and touch-screen machines. Activists, including prominent

computer scientists, have complained for years that these machines are

not secure against tampering. But electronic voting machines are also

much easier to use for disabled people and those who do not speak

English.

Voting machine vendors have dismissed many of the concerns, saying they

are theoretical and do not reflect the real-life experience of running

elections, such as how machines are kept in a secure environment.

" It just isn't the piece of equipment, " said Bear, a spokesman

for Diebold Election Systems, one of the country's largest vendors.

" It's all the elements of an election environment that make for a

secure election. "

" This report is based on speculation rather than an examination of the

record. To date, voting systems have not been successfully attacked in

a live election, " said Bob Cohen, a spokesman for the Election

Technology Council, a voting machine vendors' trade group. " The

purported vulnerabilities presented in this study, while interesting in

theory, would be extremely difficult to exploit. "

At yesterday's news conference, the push for more secure electronic

voting machines, which has been popular largely on the left side of the

political spectrum since the contested outcome of the 2000 presidential

election in Florida, picked up some high-profile support from the other

side.

Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and M. III (Va.),

chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D.

Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements

for electronic voting machines. Schmidt, former chief of

security at Microsoft and President Bush's former cybersecurity

adviser, also endorsed the Brennan report.

" It's not a question of 'if,' it's a question of 'when,' " said

of an attempt to manipulate election results.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Meryl Nass, MD

Mount Desert Island Hospital

Bar Harbor, Maine 04609

207 288-5081 ext. 220