Sancho to scrap voting machines
Diebold units were tested for security flaws
By Jeff Burlew    Tallahassee DEMOCRAT    16 December 2005

The Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office is replacing all of its voting machines after a dispute with the Diebold company over the use of equipment that leaves a paper trail of how people vote.

The company had demanded that the Elections Office use a combination of optical-scan and touch-screen equipment that wouldn't have left a paper trail after elections, said Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho.

   
Meanwhile, Sancho's office on Tuesday concluded a series of tests to see whether its 160 Diebold voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and manipulation of election results. The tests convinced Sancho that they were.

The switch to new machines was prompted not only by the security tests but also by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which requires all voting locations to have equipment that can be used by disabled people without help from elections workers.

Sancho wanted to use Automark devices made by a rival company, but Diebold balked at his requests to use the devices with their optical-scan machines, he said. The Automark devices were the only machines that would leave a paper trail of votes.

"Is it really wise to get rid of these?" Sancho asked as he held paper ballots in his hand. "Absolutely not. At this point . . . only a paper ballot audit trail can verify 100 percent of the votes cast in any jurisdiction."

On Tuesday, Sancho got approval from county commissioners to switch to optical-scan voting machines made by Election Systems and Software. The machines will be used in conjunction with the Automark devices. The cost of the equipment change is $1.2 million.

After commissioners approved the switch, Sancho conducted a test in his office to see whether election results could be manipulated using the Diebold machines. The test was conducted with the help of nonprofit group Black Box Voting and Finnish security expert Harri Hursti, who helped with similar tests earlier this year.

The Elections Office held a mock election where eight voters were asked to answer "yes" or "no" to the question "Can the votes on this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?" Testers ed a memory card into the Diebold machine that included a program designed to alter votes and leave no trace of tampering.

Two people marked their ballots with "yes" votes, while six marked "no." The ballots were fed into the machine and, when final results were printed out, they showed that seven people voted "yes" and one voted "no." The false results were accepted by the Elections Office's main computer, and no evidence was left, Sancho said.

"This is significant," Sancho said, "because this shows that Florida's voting machine certification program failed to identify critical security and design flaws in this voting system."

The state has certified Diebold equipment and is standing by the company's equipment.

"We are certainly confident with the state's ability to certify voting systems," said Susan Smith, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of State's Office.

Smith added that she could not comment on the security tests because the Secretary of State's Office was not invited to participate in them. The Diebold company could not be reached for comment.

Voters likely won't notice a change when they vote in the next election. They will continue to fill in ovals on paper ballots and feed them into optical-scan machines. Voters who are blind or who can't use their hands will use the specialized Automark devices, which will fill in the ovals for them.