Gov. Robert Ehrlich is urging all registered voters in Maryland to cast absentee ballots for the November general election after technical glitches and human error marred the state’s Sept. 12 primary. The governor says he’s lost confidence in the Diebold touch-screen voting machines purchased for use in all Maryland counties in order to comply with the federal 2002 Help America Vote Act.
Just two months ago, a trio of nationally recognized computer science experts directed harsh criticism at the Maryland State Board of Elections for its failure to alert the Federal Elections Commission about Diebold’s serious security vulnerabilities. In a July 24 op-ed, “The Diebold Bombshell,” Stanford Professor David Dill, the University of Iowa’s Doug Jones and retired IBM executive Barbara Simons disclosed the fact that Diebold “included a ‘back door’ in its software, allowing anyone to change or modify” it. Amazingly, there are “no technical safeguards in place to ensure that only authorized people can make changes.” So anybody who knows how to can literally hijack an election.
But that’s not all. “Even more shockingly, we learned that Diebold and the State of Maryland had been aware of these vulnerabilities for at least two years,”the trio noted. “They were documented in analysis, commissioned by Maryland and conducted by RABA Technologies, published in January 2004. For over two years, Diebold has chosen not to fix the security holes, and Maryland has chosen not to alert other states or national officials about these problems.”
In a paper presented at a George Washington University seminar in June, Prof. Jones recalled that when he discovered that encryption keys for AccuVote-TS machines — the same ones used in Maryland — could be found in source code widely available on the Internet, he immediately recommended the machines be decertified for use in Iowa. Maryland’s RABA report subsequently confirmed the presence of the flaw.
Maryland Elections Administrator Linda Lamone, who purchased the Diebolds, has repeatedly assured the public that the RABA report’s recommendations were being taken seriously. They were not. On May 11, Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti found that not only had the encryption problem not been fixed, but the Diebolds had two other security flaws, “each allowing a devastating attack on the system.” Hursti should know; he successfully hacked into unnetworked Diebold machines during a test in Florida last December, successfully changing results without leaving a trace.
So far, top computer scientists from Stanford, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and the University of Iowa have all stated categorically that the Diebold machines used in Maryland are not secure. The state Senate left no practical way to prevent a major electoral meltdown in November when it killed legislation requiring a paper trail that was passed unanimously by the House of Delegates and backed by the governor.
Calling for an all-absentee, paper ballot election would be loony under ordinary circumstances, but is now the only reasonable way to ensure a fraud-free election. Amid growing national concerns that the next election could well be hacked, it’s that — or inking the finger of every voter in Maryland, Iraqi-style.
Yes, unfortunately it’s come to that.
