Partisan lies about the security of Hart e-voting machines continue to flow from Hamilton County

[Columbus Free Press]

Partisan lies about the security of Hart e-voting machines continue to flow from Hamilton County
by Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis
October 25, 2012
Amy Searcy, the Hamilton County Board of Elections Supervisor, is currently the chief spin doctor for the Romney campaign, continually discounting his ties to the Hart InterCivic vote counting company. Since the Columbus Free Press began its reporting on the Romney presidential campaign and Romney family ties between voting machine manufacturer Hart InterCivic, Searcy has stepped forward in the press and in social media to repair public perception about the security of these deeply flawed devices.

The use of these machines in the battleground state of Ohio and in the highly contested county of Hamilton (Cincinnati) has already led Searcy to misrepresent her office's relationship and contracts with Hart InterCivic to the Washington Post. A day earlier, Searcy attempted to downplay ties between Hart InterCivic and the Hamilton County Board of Elections. She told the NBC affiliated blog theGrio, "Whoever is spreading these rumors is needlessly unsettling voters about things that are not true...Any kind of discontent in the electoral process is based in false rumor."

Mere hours after the Free Press exposed her falsehoods, the arch-conservative news source NewsMaxx chose to reprint her statements as if they were facts. What neither the Washington Post nor NewsMaxx chose to mention was Amy Searcy's ties to Tea Party activists. In April, Searcy addressed Tea Party activists at a major poll worker recruitment event in Cincinnati.. The Post also failed to note that she serves both as Chair of the Hamilton County Board of Elections and Vice Chair of the Hamilton County Republican Party. She seems to be well positioned to be the Kathleen Harris of Cincinnati in the 2012 presidential election.

Earlier this month, Searcy was responsible for sending erroneous voting information on postcards to 225,000 voters. When confronted by the press the mistake was called a printer's error.

Days earlier, apparently blissfully unaware of the deep security flaws in her equipment, Searcy informed Cincinnati.com (a Gannett Company) that it was permissible for voters to bring an iPad into the voting booth. Voters are not permitted to use cell phones in the polling place.

Despite assertions about the security of Hart's equipment made by Searcy, Hart InterCivic and others, the landmark EVEREST study commissioned by former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner found numerous security flaws. In its final report, the team of respected academics concluded (italics in original document, bold type is this author's emphasis):

There is a veritable sea of previously undetected functionality in the Hart system. Note that we found what we believe is only a tiny fraction of the features enabled through undocumented software triggers, e.g., Windows registry entries.

An attacker may subvert all back-end data protections in the Hart and Premier systems by exploiting combinations of new and previously known vulnerabilities.
It [is] possible to replace Hart system firmware in seconds with unfettered access to the equipment.
The previously unevaluated ExpressPoll electronic poll book is trivially vulnerable to an attacker. The team was able to completely replace the software on the pollbook and compromise voter data within an hour of gaining access to the device.

The Free Press contacted one of the academics involved in the study, William Enck, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State. When asked about the vulnerability of these machines to subversion by means of an iPad, Enck replied "It is entirely possible for a malicious attacker to subvert a Hart eSlate machine with a portable device through the built in serial port."

Phone calls to Ms. Searcy seeking comment for this article were not returned by press time. What is known is that Hamilton County should be under the greatest level of scrutiny during this election cycle.

As the Today show offered, as goes Hamilton County, so goes Ohio -- and as Ohio goes, so goes the nation.


http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2012/4758

[Esse Quam Videri]

1. Any idea what kind of play this clusterfuck is getting in the local

mainstream media?

[Columbus Free Press]

2. None yet

We are pushing the story now... But we could always use the help

[CincyDem]

4. Zip local coverage here in Cincy (Hamilton County)

She was on the local right wingnut morning radio show yesterday.

Earlier in the morning some guy called in with the story about his aunt who is, in his words, crazy. He was upset about the fact that her caregiver who he knew was obviously an Obama supporter (i.e. she's African-American) was allowed to join his aunt in the voting booth to help her fill out the ballot. His argument was that this was effectively a second vote from the caregiver because his aunt didn't have a clue.

Radio guy got the Bd. of Election woman on the phone who basically said "yeah - you have get help in the booth" and "the only way we can stop someone like this from voting is if a judge declares them mentally unfit". Her summary was "So unfortunately situations like this are perfectly legal". The radio guy was totally deflated. I guess he though he had uncovered the voter fraud event of the season. She agreed with the guy that it was shady but until legislatures and courts get serious about eliminating voter fraud like this - it will continue.

No questions or comments about the voting machines. No surprise - this local radio guy is still looking for the birth certificate.

[Kelvin Mace]

3. Some observations

According to what I have read, Ohio's H-I machines are OpScan models, not touch screen. You fill out your ballot and it is scanned in and tallied. The eSlate hack won't work on this type of voting system.

As I have stated in other posts, the safest way to affect the vote if you control a voting machine company is to collude with partisan election officials and to short key precincts on voting machines. This means long lines, and allows atro-turf poll watchers greater opportunity to challenge and intimidate voters. This is harder to do with OpScan ballots, since a person is not waiting on a machine to vote, they simply fill out the ballot.

Yes, it is easy to change the vote on a touch screen voting machine, especially if you have no printed backup. But is is hard to tamper with the vote and not get caught. If the vote count deviates from historical patterns, this throws a red flag and the opposition demands a recount and an audit of the machines. If you instead rig the vote for a close count, depending on your state, automatic recounts may occur, again increasing the risk of discovery.

[Columbus Free Press]

5. What you have read is not exactly correct

Kevin,

Here at the Free Press I have a list of every single voting machine in the state. Including serial numbers. Hamilton County, like all other counties in Ohio responded to our public records request. This is what they said about the number and types of machines in their inventory:

• Vote tabulation hardware and/or software; Hart InterCivic
· The type and number of machines used in your county and the serial numbers of the machines; -
eScan (1,025) is primary voting source. DAU (disable access unit) consisting of eSlate (751), JBC
(626) and VBO (797) for use by voters with disabilities. See attached spreadsheets listing serial
number for each voting machine


The DAU machines have a paper trail but the paper trail is not tabulated. The memory cards are taken from the machine and inserted into tabulators that read them. Thus it is possible for the paper to not match the electronic vote count if tampering happens. The paper trail is a security blanket, nothing more.

Further, there is no reason for the optical scanners to accurately count the votes if someone were to interfere with them. Which is possible.

for the Free Press
Gerry Bello

[Kelvin Mace]

6. Thanks for the new info

You are correct that OpScan code can be tampered with, but such tampering would be apparent if someone audited the results by hand-counting random precincts. This is required by law in NC (I served on the 2005 Joint Select Committee on E-Voting and it was one of the major precautions I and two other committee members insisted on in the drafted law).

I am greatly dismayed that so few states have addressed e-voting problems. We have been discussing this since 2002 and solutions are available.

[Columbus Free Press]

7. Not to scoop my own publication

but....

At the Free Press we have detected a new tampering method that is harder to detect in close races. We will be going to press with that in a few days when the Statistician we hired is done confirming our initial findings.

Stay tuned for that....

Also, we agree with your dismay at the lack of attention to e-voting systems. Since 2004 we have documented massive fraud, yet little has been done