February 21, 2007

"Princeton Prof: E-Voting Machines Easy To Hack"

"Tampering with the vote count on Sequoia touch screen voting machines is easy to do, said a college professor in a legal filing.

Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel successfully accessed and modified the computer chips that control the vote count on five of the AVC Advantage machines produced by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems. Appel bought the machines on a government auction website.

What he did anyone could do in about ten minutes, Appel said on his Web site, and in a filing in a New Jersey electronic voting lawsuit.

"These machines are usually delivered to the polling places, which are elementary schools and firehouses and so on, a day or two before the election. And they're routinely left unattended," Appel told KCBS reporter Holly Quan.

Without mentioning the large number of garages and other community centers that also serve as polling places in many neighbhorhoods, Appel went on to describe how often the machines are vulnerable.

"These voting machines sit in county warehouses for the rest of the year, and if any unauthorized or unscrupulous person had access to them just once, they could be modified to cheat," Andrew said.

A spokeswoman for Sequoia, Michelle Shafer, dismissed his gloomy predictions. She insisted that if someone did tamper with the machine, it would not go unnoticed by election officials.

"Even if somebody were to attempt to get into one voting machine, in order to do any kind of damage, they would have to have access to every single voting unit, have it be undetected on those units, and also back at election headquarters," Shafer said.

She said no such instance of hacking had taken place in the 19 years the company had employed the Advantage machines.

California law now requires electronic voting machines to issue paper receipts, a measure Appel said is essential for minimizing voter fraud."

The story is here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at February 21, 2007 10:14 AM