Bev Harris in Sunday NYT

[dutchdemocrat]

Rolling Down the Highway, Looking Out for Flawed Elections
By ADAM COHEN

Published: August 8, 2004

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.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

<SNIP>

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

[NicoleM]

1. read this!

:kick:

[Karenina]

3. Kick!

:kick:

[Moderator]

2. dutchdemocrat

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source.


Thank you.

DU Moderator