Reply #10: Lawsuit: Voting Machines Hackable

[rumpel]

Web Editor: Jon Shirek
Last Modified: 7/14/2006 8:01:07 AM

Georgia's controversial, electronic, touch-screen voting machines, less than four years old, are under fire as never before.

A lawsuit filed Thursday in Atlanta against the Governor, Secretary of State, and the State Elections Board claims the machines are obsolete and vulnerable to computer hackers bent on re-programming the units and fixing elections.

"These machines maybe can't be trusted," said Walker Chandler, the attorney for VoterGA.org, a coalition of voter rights groups representing the plaintiffs.

One of the eight plaintiffs, Ricardo Davis said, he became convinced the machines are vulnerable even to amateur hack attacks.

"Working as a poll worker, I basically figured out how I could steal an election in 10 minutes, with one accomplice," Davis told reporters at a news conference in Atlanta on Thursday.

Plaintiff Garland Favorito of VoterGA.Org said he knows of no evidence that anyone has ever reprogrammed the units illegally and stolen any elections, because the design of the machines and the unwillingness of the state and the vendor to disclose proprietary source codes make it impossible to gather any such evidence if it existed.

"We're saying that fraud and errors are undetectable, statewide,” Favorito said at the news conference. “That's worse than election fraud, because you can never detect the election fraud."

http://www.11alive.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=81939