PBS' California Connected on Recent Diebold Vulnerabilities

[Wilms]

Not Quite a Blog

PBS' California Connected on recent Diebold vulnerabilities

by Joseph Lorenzo Hall

06/22/06

California Connected, a PBS news magazine with an emphasis on California issues, has recently published the last in a special series by Thomas Kelley on the recent security vulnerabilities discovered in voting systems manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI).

It starts off with an interactive piece that sets the issue up ("Interactive: Ballot Boxes and Black Holes") and then goes in depth in a four-part series:

1. "Shortcircuits in our democracy?"
2. "Backdoors to Castle Diebold"
3. "Voting machines and hailstorms"
4. "Two sides speaking in code"

snip

They also quote (in alphabetical order) Kim Alexander (California Voter Foundation), Paul DeGregorio (Chairman of the EAC), Barbara Dunmore (RoV for Riverside Co.), Lowell Finley (VoterAction), Bev Harris (Black Box Voting), Doug Jones (Univ. of Iowa, ACCURATE), Susan Lapsley (California Asst. Sec. of State for Elections) and Mark Radke (Spokesman for DESI). There are mp3 files of interviews Thomas did linked off of this main index site for the series.

The series does a great job of explaining the issue in basic terms and parsing its complexity to make it more accessible to those who might not be election technology geeks. I especially like how it highlights the tensions between the various parties and values involved in the discussion.

snip/links

http://josephhall.org/nqb2/index.php/2006/06/22/caconn_desivulns

[autorank]

1. Nice catch fisherman!!!

[lindisfarne]

2. Well worth going to that site - good info about voting issues and links

to mp3s of the California Connected show.

For example:
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a Ph.D. student working under the auspices of ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections), says the federal procedures now in place to test and certify voting equipment need major retooling.

"It is troubling that a voting system containing a violation of the 2002 survived the federal certification and testing process," Hall writes in a background report prepared for the committee. "The federal testing process is the primary evaluation process required for voting systems in 80% of states. Given the importance of the federal process to ensuring the integrity of voting systems it is unacceptable that a flaw of this magnitude was not identified." <...>

But despite California’s extensive certification and monitoring process, Hall says there is an additional layer of confusion that undercuts some of these efforts: a lack of uniformity in voting standards across counties.

"One of the problems with all of this is voting systems are really strange," he says. "By the time you’re out there trying to sell your system to an election official, you can't make changes without going through the federal and state process over again. And so you have to be able to answer any whim of any election official with your machine right then and there. What this results in is highly configurable machines where you can't possibly test the space of all the different configurations at once."