As expected, an independent study of the Diebold electronic voting machines purchased by the state of Maryland has found that “The system, as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at high risk of compromise.” The study was commissioned by the state and performed by SAIC. A Washington Post story by Brigid Schulte reports that SAIC “found 328 security weaknesses, 26 of them critical”.
The report is available to the public only in heavily redacted form, which in itself does not inspire confidence. What is in the redacted version is bad enough; for example, it reports that the Diebold machines didn’t even bother to encrypt the vote totals before sending them to the Board of Elections.
Diebold, which had previously said we should trust their unspecified security mechanisms, now says that we should trust them to implement unspecified fixes for these problems.
In case you have any remaining confidence in unaudited electronic voting systems, consider this: a Diebold executive told the Washington Post that the fixes will be made to the Maryland machines, but not to the 33,000 Diebold electronic voting machines already in use outside of Maryland.
Leave a Reply