Wednesday, February 06, 2008

You mean someone still uses those things?

Now before I go much further I want to make something abundantly clear. Electronic voting is still the very best, most secure, voting system devised by man. That said, some systems are far more secure than others. The eSlate units used here in Harris County, made by Hart Intercivic, are the only electronic systems that have yet to be hacked in any way, shape, or form. They are the pinnacle of security at this point in time. Other systems? Eh, maybe not so much. They are certainly better than paper ballots, but some are only slightly better. Take Diebold for instance. Previously, Academics have devised a virus that could be loaded onto a Diebold machine in about 60 seconds worth of unsupervised time, that could alter vote totals system wide. That was a technical vulnerability because to do so, the actor had to get access to the flash card slot which was behind a locked door. Ok, so far so good. Every jurisdiction that uses them takes great pains to make sure there is no unauthorized access to that slot.

Now for the other shoe to fall: It would appear that Diebold used a cheap easily duplicated key for every single unit manufactured. Yes, every unit ever sold takes the same master key. What is worse, some genius has managed to fabricate a key that fits based solely on an image of the key on Diebold's website.

Further, the "paper tape" audit trail that some conspiracy theorists have been calling for would not show anything amiss.

These devices need to be removed from service immediately and Diebold needs to pay for Hart devices to replace them. The devices are not fit for use.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Since there aren't any candidates worth voting for these days, does it really matter?

;-)

Just kidding!!

February 07, 2008 8:03 AM  
Blogger Rorschach said...

There may not be many worth voting FOR, but in the absence of that we can do the next best thing and vote AGAINST the ones that should never be allowed anywhere near public office.

February 07, 2008 8:33 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

True! There's a huge plethora of them, too, huh? LOL

February 07, 2008 1:28 PM  

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