Election Official: Some Voting Machines Could Be Hacked

Elections Official: Some Voting Machines Could Be Hacked

http://www.wesh.com/news/5542983/detail.html

POSTED: 12:17 pm EST December 15, 2005

Voting machines used in four Central Florida counties might be flawed.

There's new evidence that computer hackers could change election results without anyone knowing about it, WESH 2 News reported.

The supervisor of elections in Tallahassee tested voting machines several times over the last several months, and on Monday, his workers were able to hack into a voting machine and change the outcome. He said that same thing might have happened in Volusia County in 2000.

The big controversy revolves around a little black computer card that is smaller than a floppy disk and bigger than a flash drive. The card is inserted into voting machines that scan paper ballots. The card serves as the machine's electronic brain.

But when Ion Sancho, Leon County's Supervisor of Elections, tested the Diebold system and allowed experts to manipulate the card electronically, he could change the outcome of a mock election without leaving any kind of trail. In other words, someone could fix an election and no one would know.

"The expert that we used simply programmed it on his laptop in his hotel room," Sancho said.

Sancho began investigating the problem after watching the votes come in during the infamous 2000 presidential election. In Volusia County precinct 216, a memory card added more than 200 votes to George W. Bush's total and subtracted 16,000 votes from Al Gore. The mistake was later corrected during a hand count.

After watching his computer expert change vote totals this week, Sancho said that he now believes someone on the inside did the same thing in Volusia County in 2000.

"Someone with access to the vote center in Volusia County put it on a memory card and uploaded it into the main system," Sancho said.

Sancho has been raising red flags about the system for months after other hackers were able to change votes during earlier tests. But Sancho said he's gotten nowhere with the company or with the Florida secretary of state's office, which oversees elections.

"This raises serious questions as to the state of Florida's certification program," Sancho said.

Acting Secretary of State David Mann defended the security of the machines.

"Right now, we are confident that those machines will carry on an election when they're used within the context of the security parameters that all supervisors follow," he said.

Michael Ertel, Seminole County's supervisor of elections, uses the exact same Diebold system, and he said he doubts such a security breach could happen without a lot of inside help.

"It's not the machine that is the process. The process is the security procedures set up by each individual supervisor of elections," Ertel said.

Diebold representatives don't think much of the Leon County test. Spokesman David Bear told the WESH 2 I-Team, "If you leave the keys in your car, the window open and the door unlocked, someone is going to drive off in it."

The concerns come on the heels of the resignation of Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell, a Republican fundraiser and staunch Bush supporter. Diebolds were used in Florida and Ohio in 2004, and skeptics are raising a lot of questions.

The same Diebold voting machines are still being used in Volusia, Brevard, Seminole and Osceola counties. They are also used in 26 other counties across the state.

The old machines do have a paper trail but the new electronic touch-screen machines do not. And if there's no paper trail, elections officials have to rely on the accuracy of the machines.