Touching story

I previously mentioned the business about computerized touch-screen voting machines that are subject to glitches and manipulation and leave no paper trail to verify the results. Apparently that concern is growing among election officials interested ensuring in an honest count, including those in California, Ohio, and Maryland.

Studies of the machines showed them to be deeply flawed. In the case of Maryland, Aviel D. Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist, called the system "riddled with security holes" and SAIC Corp., in a state-sponsored examination, affirmed it to be "at high risk of compromise." In Ohio, the state review

turned up so many potential security flaws in the systems that the state's top elections official has called off deploying them in March.

The detailed findings confirmed what academics, computer scientists and voter advocates across the country have said for months: Electronic voting systems are prime targets for manipulation by anyone from expert computer hackers to poll workers to individual voters. ...

The review confirmed a laundry list of security flaws that some observers had tried to dismiss as merely alarmist.

But then, of course, there are states which, it appears, are not interested in ensuring an honest count by requiring the machines produce a paper trail. Perhaps not surprisingly, among them is Florida. Last month the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections issued a statement defending touch screens and calling paper verification more or less an icky inconvenience that no one really needs. Moreover,

The supervisors' report accuses touch-screen critics of "committing a huge disservice to the voting public. The continued unfounded attacks on these systems erode the public's confidence."

This despite Florida's less-than-stellar record at elections and its horrendous experience with its introduction of electronic voting last year.

In the meantime, apparently becoming dimly aware that it was drawing undesired public attention, Diebold Industries, one of the major manuafacturers of the gizmos, has, the Miami Herald reported last week, dropped its threats to sue owners of websites that had links to documents hacked from a Diebold computer. The documents include intracompany memoes noting numerous bugs and security flaws in the software.

"This is a huge victory that shows we have weapons on our side to protect free speech from overbearing copyright laws so that the Internet remains a forum for public discussion," said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Wendy Seltzer, who represents the students and the San Francisco-based Internet service provider, Online Policy Group. "We're trying to hammer home that you can't go around making idle threats that aren't backed up by the law." ...

Diebold's battle began in March, when a hacker broke into the company's servers using an employee's ID number, and copied a 1.8-gigabyte file of company announcements, software bulletins and internal e-mails dating to January 1999.

The vast majority of the file included banal employee e-mails, software manuals and old voter record files. But several items raise security concerns about electronic voting that voting rights advocates have been trying to publicize for more than a year. ...

In August, the hacker e-mailed data to voting activists, who published the information on their Web logs. Wired News published an online story. The documents have been widely circulated.

Footnote: One such memo concerned Maryland.

An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland "out the yin-yang," if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased.

One can only wonder if the idea was to be "smart enough," as Ken says, to price gouge the state - or if it was a matter of trying to head off alternatives and the idea of verification.

For more on this, be sure to check out blackboxvoting.org.