Ohio seizes voting machines in criminal investigation
 
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:12:21 -0500 (CDT)


http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080318-ohio-seizes-voting-machines-in-criminal-investigation.html

Ohio seizes voting machines in criminal investigation

By Ryan Paul | Published: March 18, 2008 - 08:38AM CT

At the request of election officials, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal
Identification and Investigation has seized voting machines for forensic
analysis and has launched a criminal investigation into the Franklin
County Board of Elections.
Related Stories

    * Ohio e-voting review makes a mockery of "recounts"
    * 1,000 pages of bad news: Ohio e-voting report released

The investigation was launched after Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's Secretary of
State and chief election official, found that a candidate's name was
marked as withdrawn on the electronic voting machine that she used during
the recent primaries, an irregularity that was also reported by voters in
other precincts. The state attorney general is now working with a team of
computer forensic consultants to determine if there was any tampering.

Preliminary analysis conducted by specialists from SysTest Labs indicates
that the internal audit capability of the Franklin County voting machines
had been manually disabled by county election board programmers last year,
making it almost impossible to tell if any nefarious changes have been
made to the systems. SysTest also discovered that the election board had
failed to adhere to routine machine testing standards and had tested only
one machine in each precinct rather than all of the machines.

Ohio has seen one electronic voting disaster after another ever since
counties in the state began adopting the technology. Two Cuyahoga election
officials were convicted of rigging a recount in May 2004 because they
literally admitted to doing precounts and displayed the evidence while
being recorded on videotape. A different Cuyahoga county recount, for a
November 2007 local election, was equally marred when Brunner turned the
state's voter-verifiable paper audit trail law into a mockery by
conducting the recount with paper ballots reprinted after the election
from voting machine memory cards.

After all of these incidents, Brunner launched a $1.9 million security
review which determined that the voting machines used in the state are all
egregiously insecure and susceptible to manipulation and outright fraud in
numerous ways. The review produced over 1,000 pages of documentation
describing the profound flaws that impact the systems.

According to WHIOTV, which conducted a television interview with Brunner,
the state will consider dumping the faulty touch-screen voting machines
and switching to more reliable optical scanners that read votes from
conventional paper ballots. Rep. Kevin DeWine, a state legislator and
deputy chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, vehemently opposes returning
to paper ballots because doing so would likely cost the state an estimated
$64 million. His arguments seem dubious in the face of the growing costs
associated with cleaning up the messes created by the defective
touch-screen voting systems.

Security evaluations conducted in several states demonstrate clearly that
electronic voting machines commercially available from virtually all of
the mainstream vendors utterly fail to meet even the most basic security
standards. With the important 2008 elections approaching quickly, states
need to reevaluate the implications of their election policies and
seriously consider going back to paper if more advanced technology can't
get the job done.
Further reading

    * WHIOTV: Ohio faces $64 million question (This article also has links
to video interviews with Brunner and DeWine)
    * The Columbus Dispatch: County's voting machines examined