Rolling Down the Highway, Looking Out for Flawed Elections/BevHarris

[kskiska]

By ADAM COHEN

KINGMAN, Ariz. — The elections director of Mohave County, Ariz., was so proud of his new electronic voting system that Bev Harris barely had the heart to point out its vulnerabilities. But she did, and before long she was ticking off the ways that she said an outsider could hijack his central tabulator - the computer that stores all of the county's votes - and steal an election.

By the time she had shown him a "backdoor" way to gain access to his software without a password, the elections director was visibly concerned. Before she left, he asked her to send him a list of things he could do to safeguard this year's election.

Ms. Harris's visit to Mohave County was part of a monthlong trip in which she and her deputy, Andy Stephenson, traveled to 10 states, investigating flaws in electronic voting and giving on-the-fly computer security tutorials.

The trip started out in Ohio, where they knocked on the doors of employees of Diebold, one of the largest and most criticized voting machine companies. It ended in late July in Las Vegas at Defcon, a hackers' convention, where the consensus was that cracking a voting machine might not be so hard.

Ms. Harris, the director of Black Box Voting (the Web address is www.blackboxvoting.org), has made herself public enemy No. 1 for voting machine manufacturers, and some elections officials, with her hard-edged attacks on electronic voting and her investigative style. (She acknowledges that at one point in Ohio, she and Mr. Stephenson hid in the bushes with a microphone, eavesdropping on Diebold workers.)

more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/opinion/08sun3.html

[Moderator]

1. Kick

:kick:

[Vitruvius]

2. And another kick; the article is worth it.

:kick:

[eridani]

3. From the current BBV site

Wondering what possible 'legitimate' purpose infrared ink on ballots could serve? I can think of quite a few illegitimate ones, though.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

6. Unusual ink on ES&S ballots We received a report from Lisa Burks in Arkansas about a printing plant that was asked to create special infrared codes on the back of ES&S ballots for the May 18 primary. A document provided to us by an ES&S employee in Omaha corroborates this, and describes a number of different inks, with a cryptic note that the infrared ink will suffice "for the purpose intended."