RE: CRIME Electronic Voting Security

From: Andrew Plato (aplato@private)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 15:43:26 PDT

  • Next message: Andrew Plato: "RE: CRIME SecureWorld Seattle September 24 & 25"

    > From: Crispin Cowan [mailto:crispin@private]
    
    > This doesn't work for vote by mail, because ballots can be
    > intercepted 
    > anywhere between the voter and the counting offices. Want to 
    > rig a close 
    > election? Bribe 100 letter carriers.
    
    A few thoughts...
    
    Theoretically, you could bribe polling working just as easy as you could
    bribe a postal carrier. The polling worker could hand you a corrupted
    ballot, get your ballot out of the box - whatever. Fortunately, both
    postal carriers and polling workers in this country seem to take their
    responsibility pretty seriously. As such, I am not terribly worried
    about these individuals throwing an election. But, needless to say, the
    opportunity for election fraud exists at many levels. 
    
    Electronic systems merely add a new mechanism for abuse. The only
    difference with electronic systems is that a very few people really
    understand how they work. Hence, you have a group of people with the
    capability to cause problems and do so virtually undetected. This is why
    such systems need audit trails that can be followed later. 
    
    One of the complaints about the Deibold system was that it was
    essentially a black box. There was no way to audit the function of the
    system. Hence, some bright hacker could corrupt the system at some point
    and for the rest of the day all votes for George Bush could get
    attributed to Al Sharpton.
    
    Oregon will NOT be using Deibold's system. Deibold was under
    consideration, but the elections group selected a local firm - Saber
    Consulting - to design a new system. 
    
    It would seem to me that election fraud isn't nearly as serious of a
    problem as voter turn out. When only 40% of the eligible people
    participate in an election, then essentially only 40% of the population
    is making decisions for the remaining 60%. Anything that encourages
    voter turn out without causing significant opportunity for fraud seems
    like a good idea to me. 
    
    ___________________________________
    Andrew Plato, CISSP
    President/Principal Consultant
    Anitian Enterprise Security 
     
    503-644-5656 Office
    503-644-8574 Fax
    503-201-0821 Mobile
    www.anitian.com
    ___________________________________
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Sep 11 2003 - 15:59:49 PDT