One Person with a Blackberry Could Swing a Vote

by James Parks, Jun 30, 2006

Do you own a Blackberry? Then you might be able to change the outcome of a state or national election.

That’s the frightening finding of a yearlong study on electronic voting released Wednesday by the Brennan Center for Justice. The report, The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World, concludes the three major electronic voting systems used in the United States—optical scanners, touch screen with paper trails and those without paper trails—have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But the report also offers hope: Most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. So far, 26 states require paper records of votes, but fewer than half of those require regular audits.

Lawrence Norden, associate counsel of the Brennan Center and chairman of the study, which was prepared by a panel of scientific and legal experts, said in a statement:

With electronic voting systems, there are certain attacks that can reach enough voting machines…that you could affect the outcome of the statewide election.

All you need is a wireless device such as a Blackberry that sends a signal to other wireless devices and enough technical knowledge, Norden said on the radio program “Democracy Now.”

With important sections of the Voting Rights Act at risk of expiring next year, the revelations about the insecurity of voting machines raises more questions about the fairness of the nation’s election system.

After the debacle in Florida in the 2000 elections, the federal government poured billions of dollars into states to help them replace outdated voting machines with optical scan ballot and touch-screen machines. Many activists have said these machines are not  tamper-proof and in fact would disenfranchise more voters while leaving the door open for the same kinds of problems we had in 2000. Last year, the AFL-CIO Executive Council called for increased efforts to make sure voting systems were safe:

The 2000 presidential election was a wake up call for many Americans who believed that disenfranchisement was a thing of the past. Countless citizens were denied their constitutional right to vote as a result of failed voting systems, flawed processes, and—by some accounts—deliberate intimidation and chicanery. The failure of voting systems around the country disproportionately disenfranchised people of color, people with disabilities, the poor, and older Americans. Ultimately, these failures cheated us all.

The major vulnerability in the voting machines is the wireless components, according to the Brennan Center study. A person with a wireless communication device could easily send a software attack program or another corrupt software to the machines and alter the vote count.

The report says it’s easy to remedy these flaws, but few jurisdictions have them in place. Some of the key fixes include:

• Conducting automatic routine audits comparing voter-verified paper records to the electronic record following every election.
• Banning use of voting machines with wireless components. All three voting systems are more vulnerable to attack if they have wireless components. Currently, only two states, New York and Minnesota, ban wireless components on all voting machines.
• Ensuring local jurisdictions handle programming and voting system administration rather than allowing a single entity, such as a vendor or state or national consultant, perform key tasks for multiple jurisdictions. That just makes the attacks easier, the report says.

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