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Easily Hacked Voting Systems to be Used in MA Special Election for the U.S. Senate

Written by Nathan Barker and Brad Friedman

BOSTON, MA - Next Tuesday's Special Election for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts looks to be coming down to the wire. Surprising pundits in what had previously been thought to be a cakewalk for State Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate hoping to fill the seat of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, Republican state Senator Scott Brown has come on strong in the final days of the campaign.

But as the election looms, tempers flare, money is poured into the contest from all sides, and Democrats sweat out what should have been a safe seat for them - a Democrat named Kennedy has held that particular seat for more than the last 50 years - questions about whether the election results can be trusted have already emerged in a race where the stakes couldn't be higher.

As the 60th "filibuster-proof" Democratic U.S. Senate seat hangs in the balance - and the party's healthcare reform bill and other key legislative hopes along with it - fears are mounting that the final vote tallies could be as questionable as they were in the recent NY-23 Special Election for the U.S. House. Perhaps even more so.

The electronic voting systems used in Massachusetts are notoriously plagued with problems and vulnerabilities, and are in violation of federal voting system standards. Moreover, they are sold, programmed, and maintained by a company with a disturbing criminal background.

The outcome couldn't be more important, and the race, according to a number of pre-election polls, couldn't be closer. Coakley began running in September, 2009 with a strong lead over Brown, her main opponent. But that trend has significantly changed in the last month leaving Coakley with a thin 2 point margin over Brown, according to a recent poll from Republican pollster Rasmussen. Another more recent survey, from a Democratic-leaning outfit, gives Coakley a more comfortable 8 point edge over Brown.

Still, the very real possibility that a Republican could win the seat has many in Washington sweating on the eve of the Special Election. All three candidates - Joseph Kennedy (no relation to Ted), a Libertarian running on the Independent Party ticket could also throw a wrench into the works - and their supporters are pulling out all the last minutes stops.  But could we see another repeat of last November's U.S. House Special Election in New York, where questions still persist about the tabulation of the race and the failed and faulty voting systems that voters were forced to use?

The Diebold electronic voting machines to be used in more than 90% of the state's districts are the same demonstrably unreliable ballot scanning systems that were seen being hacked in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy. The rest of the machines used in the Bay State are made by Sequoia Voting System, Inc., the same manufacturer whose machines were "misconfigured," to switch votes in Erie County, NY's Nov. 3, 2009 election and which have failed, and even been hacked, in a number of cases around the country.

Making matters worse, the company who sells, services and programs the Diebold optical-scan paper ballot systems to be used next week, LHS Associates, has a disturbing criminal background, and has admitted to tampering illegally with voting systems during past elections.

As seen in the climactic finale of Hacking Democracy, due to undocumented "interpreted code" in the system, included by Diebold in violation of federal voting system guidelines, the Diebold Accuvote op-scan system is easily hacked and votes can be flipped in such a way that the tampering would likely never be discovered.

The vulnerability, easily exploited by Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti in the film, resulted in flipped results for a mock election held in Leon County, FL several years ago. At the time, news of the hack sent shockwaves throughout the e-voting industry, and among state and federal election officials. But the federally certified machines were never decertified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, despite the discovery of the code in violation of federal standards. That code, allowing this simple exploitation, still remains on the systems to be used in next week's special election in Massachusetts.

The key to the exploit is access to the scanner's memory cards. Those sensitive cards contain the programming instructions for how the machines should read paper ballots as they pass through it. They also track the tally of votes. In Hursti's hack, he was able to make a slight change to the memory cards' programming instructions which flipped the results in such a way that only a manual hand count of every ballot would have revealed the manipulation.

The machines and cards are often accessed by both election officials and the private vendors who program and maintain them. In Massachusetts, as in most of New England, an outfit by the name of LHS Associates services the machines.

The company has, to put it generously, a dubious record.

More . . .

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