Test shows voter fraud is possible - Tallahassee Democrat | 06/04/2005 |

Tallahassee Democrat | 06/04/2005 | Test shows voter fraud is possible: "Posted on Sat, Jun. 04, 2005
Machines are vulnerable to manipulation

All it takes is the right access.

Get that, and an election worker could manipulate voting results in the computers that read paper ballots - without leaving any digital fingerprints.

That was the verdict after Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho invited a team of researchers to look for holes in election software.

The group wasn't able to crack the Diebold system from outside the office. But, at the computer itself, they changed vote tallies, completely unrecorded.

Sancho said it illustrates the need for tight physical security, as well as a paper trail that can verify results, which the Legislature has rejected.
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It went like this:

Sancho figured Leon County's security could withstand just about any sort of probing and wanted to prove it.

He went to one of the most skeptical - and vocal - watchdogs of election procedures. Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, had experience with voting machines across the country.

She recruited two computer-security experts and made the trip to Tallahassee from her home in Washington state three times between February and late May.

Leon County is one of 30 counties in Florida that use Diebold optical scanners. Voters darken bubbles on a sheet of paper, sort of like filling in the answers on the SAT, and the scanners read them and add up the numbers.

So the task was simple. Get in, tamper with vote numbers, and get out clean.

They made their first attempts from outside the building. No success.

Then, they sat down at the vote-counting computers, the sort of access to the machines an employee might have. For the crackers, security protocols were no problem, passwords unnecessary.

They simply went around them.

After that, the security experts accomplished two things that should not have been possible.

They made 65,000 votes disappear simply by changing the real memory card - which stores the numbers - for one that had been altered.

And, while the software is supposed to create a record whenever someone makes changes to data stored in the system, it showed no evidence they'd managed to access and change information.

When they were done, they printed the poll tapes. Those are paper records, like cash register tape, that show the official numbers on the memory cards.

Two tapes, with different results. And the only way to tell the fake one?

At the bottom, it read, 'Is this real? Or is it Memorex?'

'That was troubling,' Sancho said.
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In Volusia County, her group has found what they think was memory-card tampering during the 2000 election. More than 16,000 votes for Al Gore vanished."