As Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security
In Controlled Test, Results Are Manipulated in Florida SystemBy Zachary Goldfarb
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 22, 2006; Page A06
As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself.
Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.A touch-screen voting machine is demonstrated. State and county election officials are demanding that electronic balloting systems leave a paper trail that can be audited when results are disputed. (By Kiichiro Sato -- Associated Press) Sancho's most recent demonstration was last month. Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, manipulated the "memory card" that records the votes of ballots run through an optical scanning machine.
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But the questions raised by Sancho, who has held his post since 1989, show how the concerns are being taken more seriously among elections professionals.
"While electronic voting systems hold promise for improving the election process," the Government Accountability Office said in a report to Congress last year, there are still pressing concerns about "security and reliability . . . design flaws" and other issues.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/21/AR2006012101051.html