Elections Cover-up 3/1/18, 846 PM Elections Cover-up A Two-Page Summary of Revealing Media Reports With Links The concise excerpts from media articles below reveal major problems with the elections process. This is not a partisan matter. Fair elections are crucial to all who support democracy. Few have compiled this information in a way that truly educates the public on the great risk of using electronic voting machines. Spread the word and be sure to vote. MSNBC News, 9/28/11, It only takes $26 to hack a voting machine Researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have developed a hack that, for about $26 and an 8th-grade science education, can remotely manipulate the electronic voting machines used by millions of voters all across the U.S. Researchers ... from Argonne National Laboratory's Vulnerability Assessment Team demonstrate three different ways an attacker could tamper with, and remotely take full control, of the e-voting machine simply by attaching what they call a piece of "alien electronics" into the machine's circuit board. The $15 remote control ... enabled the researchers to modify votes from up to a half-mile away. CNN News, 9/20/06, Voting Machines Put U.S. Democracy at Risk Electronic voting machines...time and again have been demonstrated to be extremely vulnerable to tampering and error. During the 2004 presidential election, one voting machine...added nearly 3,900 additional votes. Officials caught the machine's error because only 638 voters cast presidential ballots. In a heavily populated district, can we really be sure the votes will be counted correctly? A 2005 Government Accountability Office report on electronic voting confirmed the worst fears: "There is evidence that some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes." New York Times, 9/5/06, In Search of Accurate Vote Totals A recent government report details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election. Cuyahoga County...recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record. Investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised. MSNBC/Associated Press, 9/13/06, Princeton Prof Hacks E-vote Machine A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel...to claims that electronic voting machines...are vulnerable to hacking. In a paper posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines. They designed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothing wrong. USA Today/Associated Press, 7/13/06, Electronic Voting Machines Under Legal Attack Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers. New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study...that determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member of the public with some (computer) knowledge." Lowell Finley: "We had dozens of affidavits from voters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent." Washington Post, 6/28/06, A Single Person Could Swing an Election A team of cybersecurity experts [concluded] that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the [election] outcome. New York Times, 5/30/06, Block the Vote States are adopting rules that make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartisan groups to register new voters. New rules for maintaining voter rolls...are likely to throw off many eligible voters. Florida recently reached a new low when it actually bullied the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter registration efforts. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties on volunteers who slip up in registration drives. Newsweek, 5/29/06, Will Your Vote Count in 2006? A report by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines [and] found unheralded vulnerabilities. Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that...could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. It's even possible...to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems. https://www.wanttoknow.info/electionscoverups Page 1 of 2 Elections Cover-up 3/1/18, 846 PM Wall Street Journal, 5/12/06, Reversing Course on Electronic Voting Some advocates of a 2002 law mandating upgrades of the nation's voting machinery now worry the overhaul is making things worse. Proponents of the Help America Vote Act are filing lawsuits to block some state and election officials' efforts to comply with the act. In Indiana, an ES&S [major voting machine supplier] employee alerted local-election officials that another ES&S worker had installed unauthorized software on the machines before the election. That and other disputes led to a multimillion-dollar settlement. Washington Post, 3/26/06, Election Whistle-Blower Stymied by Vendors Ion Sancho is...elections supervisor in Leon County, Fla. Last year, [he] helped show that electronic voting machines...would allow election workers to alter vote counts without detection. Sancho may be paying an unexpected price for his whistle-blowing: None of the state-approved companies here will sell him the voting machines the county needs.The trouble began last year when Sancho allowed a Finnish computer scientist to test Leon County's Diebold voting machines. Diebold will not sell to Sancho without assurances that he will not permit more such tests, which the company considers a reckless use of the machines. New York Times, 9/12/04, On the Voting Machine Makers' Tab Some of electronic voting's loudest defenders have been state and local election officials. Many of those same officials have financial ties to voting machine companies. Officials from Georgia, California and Texas argued that voter-verifiable paper trails...are impractical. Former secretaries of state from Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election Systems and Software and Diebold Election Systems. The list goes on. MSNBC/AP, 8/23/04, Secretive Testing Firms Certify Nation's Vote Count Machines The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the machines. Federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology. New York Times, 1/31/04, How to Hack an Election Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines. Paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. Diebold...rushed to issue a self-congratulatory press release with the headline "Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment." The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively. For a powerful, reliable 10-page summary of the elections cover-up, click here For astonishing facts on who counts your vote: www.WantToKnow.info/votingproblems For more on elections cover-ups and what you can do: Elections Information Center https://www.wanttoknow.info/electionscoverups Page 2 of 2.