E-Vote Software Leaked Online! (Second time)

Wired Magazine ^ | 05:00 PM Oct. 29, 2003 PT | 05:00 PM Oct. 29, 2003 PT

[vannrox]

Software used by an electronic voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems has been left unprotected on a publicly available server, raising concerns about the possibility of vote tampering in future elections.

The software, made available at ftp.jaguar.net, is stored on an FTP server owned by Jaguar Computer Systems, a firm that provides election support to a California county. The software is used for placing ballots on voting kiosks and for storing and tabulating results for the Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen system.

[rs79bm]

has been left unprotected on a publicly available server

Just think if all companies did that. There would be no need to buy software.

[GladesGuru]

This is a fully automated, electronic voting system. Nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong

[templar]

Voting machine code should be kept the most highly protected secret the nation has. It's the only way to assure that only official sources will be able to tamper with the electoral process.

[templar]

Voting machine code should be kept the most highly protected secret the nation has. It's the only way to assure that only official sources will be able to tamper with the electoral process.

[rs79bm]

I wonder if a secret Gov't agency should be designing this stuff, instead of public companies. That is just begging for trouble.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

The compilers could also be hacked and change the source code.

[Ff--150]

VOTESCAM...algore wasn't suppose to lose--

[D-fendr]

Good grief. Start with an insecure operating system connected to an insecure database engine.

Publicly posting the code was just icing the cake.

Do these guys even think about security?

[null and void]

And all this time I thought the code was being written in India or China...

[Irish Eyes]

There is absolutly nothing wrong with punch cards, butterfly ballots or anything similar, only with the people that use them. You do not even have to read English to vote anymore.

[pointsal]

sounds like a hanging chad to me..... don't worry, I know how you intended to vote, if you were appropriately informed.

[Cicero]

Punch cards or other forms of paper ballots are a LOT more difficult to tamper with. You have to wonder why the Democrats have been so eager to trade in ballots for software.

Well, you don't have to wonder too much. Instead of poking a steel rod through the ballots by the Democrat's name or throwing inconvenient ballot boxes into the harbor, all you have to do is touch a few computer keys and, bingo, millions of votes flip from Republican to Democrat in one nanosecond.

[longtermmemmory]

This is telling. The last line of defense that the leftists have is the local elections. They have EVERY interest in establishing a recount proof system which they can control.

They are no longer a national party, next they will no longer be even a local political party.

[supercat]

Voting machine code should be kept the most highly protected secret the nation has. It's the only way to assure that only official sources will be able to tamper with the electoral process.

Nonsense. It should be fully public. If the system is well-designed, publicizing the code will not compromise security but will allow people to verify that the election is on the up-and-up. By contrast, if the code is a super-tightly-kept secret, then it becomes impossible for anyone to know whether the code that's being run is legitimate. Even if the source code is made available to auditors, unless they are given full compilable copies there's no way for autitors to confirm that the source code they inspect bears any relationship whatsoever to the code that's actually being used.

[templar]

By contrast, if the code is a super-tightly-kept secret, then it becomes impossible for anyone to know whether the code that's being run is legitimate.

That's the point. And the purpose. What you wanna do, make people suspicious of the honesty of the elections? Next thing you know, the courts will end up having to decide what's a valid or invalid vote.

[supercat]

Punch cards or other forms of paper ballots are a LOT more difficult to tamper with. You have to wonder why the Democrats have been so eager to trade in ballots for software.

What I would like to see would be a hybrid system using machine-readable optical ballots, a vote-entry terminal for disabled people which would produce a machine-readable optical ballot just like one that would be cast by a normal voter, and a ballot-counting system which tags each ballot and produces reports to make spot-checking ballots practical. Under such a system, a spot check of 100 ballots selected at random would be very likely to catch a 2% fraud/error rate; a check of 1,000 ballots would be sufficient to catch a 0.2% fraud/error rate. Note that that's 100 or 1,000 ballots selected at random for the entire area of the election. Very doable.