Last summer, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner asked an independent team of nationally accredited academic and corporate computer and election experts to test Ohio’s voting machines. Many are the same machines used in Montana to count our votes. The results?
Released Dec. 14, the
Testing was done against criteria adapted from the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, because it “incorporates all of the existing standards associated with both general information security and specifically with the security of electronic voting systems,” per the report.
Researchers found the M100 optical scanners are “susceptible to attacks at the polling location that could affect election integrity,” and “an unauthorized individual could delete records of votes by zeroing out the vote totals.” The 650 counter was “successfully tampered to alter elections data in erratic ways and with obvious, but unpredictable results.” The Automark’s sensitive inner machine was easily accessed by disassembling its cover.
Read the report at www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/
EVEREST.aspx.
A key finding was that ES&S had “failed to adopt, implement and follow industry standard best practices in the development of the system.” Many of these weaknesses n known for years n continue to exist in ES&S systems.
The report also recommended: “Applications themselves need to be hardened against known forms of attack, while the various other components should be configured to enforce the basic security rules of the best practices frameworks.” Anti-virus software, firewalls, complex passwords and malicious programming alerts are also needed.
Montana law requires that state-approved voting systems “be based on commonly accepted industry standards for readily available technologies.”
Montana Secretary of State Brad Johnson claims, “Montana’s counties and the secretary of state’s office take a long list of measures to ensure the integrity of our voting systems,” but those measures, although critical, are not sufficient as long as the machines are vulnerable to tampering that could change election results.
The report has done Montana voters a huge favor. We now know the security weaknesses of our vote counting machines, and what to do about them.
Montana voters deserve to know that the machines that count their votes have met industry standards. Although Montana uses paper ballots and could re-check their totals, we don’t routinely n only in close races within one-half of 1 percent.
The League of Women Voters of Montana calls upon Brad Johnson to assure voters that their votes are secure and accurately counted by decertifying ES&S machines, then re-certifying them only if they meet the specific recommendations in the EVEREST report.
Sara Busey of the League of Women Voters of Montana was joined in writing this column by League co-presidents Joan Hurdle and Gladys Hardin, and by the League’s board members.
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