Florida: The Harri Hursti Hack and its Importance to our Nation

[updated January 21, 2006] I was one of ten people present at the "hack" of the Leon County, Florida voting system, which took place on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 around 4:30 in the afternoon at the county elections warehouse. Leon County's voting system is the Diebold Accu-Vote OS 1.94w (optical scan).

The Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, authorized a "test" of his Diebold voting system to see if election results could be altered using only a memory card. Harri Hursti (photo at right), a computer programmer from Finland, who has been working with Black Box Voting, facilitated the test and it has come to be known as the "Harri Hursti Hack."

Following is a description of that hack and its significance for our nation, which I hope will correct much of the misinformation circulating regarding this event.

The ONLY evidence in the Hursti hack that could discredit his alteration of results were the paper ballots themselves.But these ballots can only be useful if they are actually counted after an election to check against the machine count. The Hursti hack shows clearly that there must be an independent paper trail that can be manually audited to confirm (or discredit) machine results. The hack exposes a serious electronic voting flaw, but then, ironically, re-instates optical scan as the only electronic voting method that provides truly independent, manual audit capabilities.

... from the article

I'm a computer professional and I just wasted about an hour trying to formulate an independent checking system with multiple vendors to counter-check each other. What I realize is that over the years we have had many voting scandals and yet we continue to vote because we have ultimate confidence that the system mostly works. What we need to fight is the ultimate enemy, that which destroys that confidence.

My biggest gripe with the current system is the proverbial "rush to judgment" we see every election as early polls are read like the entrails of a pagan sacrifice. I see no reason that we need to know the results the next morning with our coffee and many reasons to suspect the errors that can innocently be created by the perceived need to rush.

I want a transparent voting process where I, as a normal citizen, can see and have confidence, that there is no hanky-panky going on. This means to me, clearly marked ballots that can be 1) verified before being cast by the individual and 2) recounted independently by easily verified standards in front of the public. I want to be able to go to the elections office and see ballot x held up for all to see, run through the counter and all of the proper vote counters incremented.

What lost my faith in the 2000 recounts as a Florida Voter was the guy with a magnifying glass counting the dimples to see if they were pregnant. A Ballot that requires a clear and clean marking to be accepted as a vote (giving the voter a chance to redo it until it passes muster) and then can be physically stored for later verification is the minimum. It is a most important and valuable birthright to have our votes count as we vote them.

yevgenie wrote:
>I love how these people specifically target Diebold
>because of the "Republican" connection. The fact is that
>I doubt one could make any electronic voting system free >from hacking.

Certainly you'll never have a perfect voting system, but as I understand it, this exploit was apparently based on the fact that an executable on the memory card is called. Dependance on code stored on the removable, rewritable media seems to just be asking for trouble.

But I'd be very curious if approved machines are any better. What's moveon.org doing approving machines anyway? I'm a liberal on many issues, I'll admit. But I don't see this as a partisan issue at all, however anyone wants to spin it. Secure voting is critical, and while security will never be perfect, thats no excuse to not improve it.

Is there any sort of REAL standards comittee or body of experts thats rigorously testing these machines in real world subversion scenarios and code analysis? I'm guessing not, since these companies seem to favor the posistion of security through obfuscation and concealment of code.

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