Maryland’s electronic voting machines are even worse than we thought. The Diebold AccuVote-TS that a Princeton team led by computer scientist Edward Felten obtained in May from an “undisclosed location” actually came from Maryland, The Examiner has learned. Felten’s team found it “vulnerable to extremely serious attacks” — including the spread of an undetectable computer virus via infected memory cards that could potentially change election data throughout the entire state.
We’ve also been told that just one infected memory card — which has no auditable serial number — surreptitiously inserted into a server used to count election results could effectively disenfranchise every voter in Montgomery County, and nobody would be the wiser.
Felten points out on his blog (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) that “the access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.” Even without a key, researchers were able to pick the lock in as little as 10 seconds.
Workers in the Montgomery County warehouse used to store election-related material are supposed to use a checklist to pack the bags destined for each precinct. There’s a separate pocket for the plastic voter access cards, so “it’s very difficult to leave that component out,” one veteran of 12 county elections told The Examiner. But somehow they did.
Blame this fiasco on “human error,” specifically that of Maryland elections administrator Linda Lamone — first appointed by former Gov. Parris Glendening and practically given life tenure by the Democratic-controlled state legislature in 2002 when Gov. Robert Erlich was elected as Maryland’s first Republican governor in 30 years. Lamone has known about these and other serious problems for at least three years.
A Dec. 13, 2004, report to the Montgomery County Election Board noted that 106 Diebold voting machines — 12 percent of the county’s total — “froze when the voter pressed the Cast Ballot button,” with election judges “unable to provide substantial confirmation that the vote was in fact counted.”
But Lamone, who can only be removed by an 80 percent supermajority vote of the full elections board, deliberately chose to ignore clear warnings from academics and computer experts. Equally to blame is the Maryland Senate, which earlier this year killed a bill passed unanimously by the House of Delegates to require a paper trail for all elections.
“You don’t like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives,” warns Johns Hopkins computer scientist Avi Rubin, who notes major security vulnerabilities have been found every time objective computer professionals have examined Diebold voting machines.
With a critical national election coming up in less than two months, Congress, the president and the leaders of the major political parties should agree on emergency paper ballot legislation immediately. No more excuses when the integrity of our electoral system is quite literally at stake.
