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We All Knew It; They Just Confirmed It
Posted by ShakeerState: Florida Voting Machines Can Be Hacked
By Marc Caputo
The Miami Herald Tuesday 31 July 2007
Tallahassee - Reversing an unofficial policy of denial, the Florida Secretary of State’s office has conducted an elections study that confirmed Tuesday what a maverick voting chief discovered nearly two years ago: Insider computer hackers can change votes without a trace on Diebold optical-scan machines.
The study by Florida State University found that, despite recent software fixes, an “adversary” could use a pre-programmed computer card to swap one candidate’s votes for another or create a “ballot-stuffing attack” that multiplies votes for a candidate or issue.
A Diebold spokesman, Mark Radke, said the company is confident it will upgrade the “minor” software glitch by an Aug. 17 deadline the state has set. If it doesn’t, Secretary of State Kurt Browning said his office would eventually ban the use of optiscan Diebold machines in Florida, where 25 counties, including Monroe, use its fill-in-the-blank systems.
Browning, who credited Diebold for its openness, said he ordered the FSU study in the wake of a test conducted in late 2005 by Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho, who allowed a Finnish computer scientist named Harri Hursti unfettered access to the voting systems to see if they could be compromised. Hursti found that votes could be changed without leaving much of a trace.
”The larger issue in my mind is: Since we’ve all been asleep at the wheel, there maybe should have been more effective tests on the machines than we’ve run,” Sancho said. “So there’s a lot we still don’t know about.”
But there is a lot that we do know. We have a president who didn’t win the popular vote in the White House now and some Florida electoral votes that could have made the difference. Black people have been complaining since the election that they were disenfranchised in Florida, this information just confirms the worst fears. What do we do now? We don’t get a recount and I’m sure all of those fisrt time voters who came out in ‘04 don’t have any faith in the system now and the proof is there that they are right not to have any faith in it.
