Guest Blogged by Gary Beckwith of Vermonters for Voting Integrity, The Election Justice Center and The Solar Bus...

Yet another independent study by computer security experts has concluded Diebold's Optical-Scan election system is vulnerable to hacking and rigging. This time it's the Voting Technology Research Center, at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Connecticut. Their conclusions will sadden anyone who values democracy. Here are a few quotations from the report titled, "A Case Study in Optical Scan E-Voting":

[W]e demonstrate that it is [possible] to strengthen known attacks ... so that they become undetectable prior to elections or, to conditionally bias the election results to reach a desired outcome.
...
[W]e demonstrate a "time bomb" attack in which the bytecode checks the date and time in order to decide whether the election has begun. [It can] retain proper behavior in pre-election testing, while behaving improperly during the actual election.
...
[I]f the Optical Scan printouts are the sole means of reporting the election results (as it is the case in fact in many jurisdictions)* then one can write quite complex malicious reporting functionalities that get triggered in specific cases (when e.g., the number of votes of a certain candidate are below a certain percentage) and perform arbitrary vote transfers between the candidates.

*including Vermont

Click here for the full report.

There are now at least 5 major independent studies like this. It's becoming like "beating a dead horse." But it's not a horse, it's the door of our election officials offices that are being pounded on, and they are simply ignoring the call. We know that our state's election authorities are reading these reports. So the question is, why do they ignore the experts and leave our democracy at risk?

I'm from Vermont, a place you'd think the election officials would do the right thing. But the fact is, that many people have written to Secretary of State Deb Markowitz and Director of Elections Kathy DeWolfe about this. (click here for their contact info if you want to write to them yourself) Many people have asked them, "when are you going to institute random audits on the elections, like all of these studies recommend?"

Their answer is becoming more and more embarrassing...

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