Electronic voting machines from Diebold Inc. have computer security and physical security problems that might allow corrupt insiders or determined outsiders to disrupt or even steal an election, according to a report presented yesterday to Maryland state legislators.
But authors of the report — which described the first official effort to hack Diebold voting systems under election conditions — were careful to say the machines, if not hacked, count votes correctly. And they said the vulnerabilities the exercise found could be addressed in a preliminary way in time for the state's primaries in March.
"I don't want to beat people up," said Michael Wertheimer, a security expert for RABA Technologies in Columbia, Md., who oversaw the exercise. "I want to get an election that people can feel good about."
Further steps could be taken to ensure a safe general election in November, the report concluded. But ultimately, it said, Diebold election software had to be rewritten to meet industry security standards and limited use of paper receipts to verify votes would be needed.
A spokesman for Diebold, which is based in North Canton, Ohio, emphasized the report's positive elements. "There is nothing that has not been, or can't be, mitigated" before the election, David Bear, the spokesman, said.
In a statement, Bob Urosevich, president of the Diebold election-systems unit, said that this report and another by the Science Applications International Corporation "confirm the accuracy and security of Maryland's voting procedures and our voting systems as they exist today."
Maryland has spent more than $55 million for the machines. Georgia has chosen Diebold for elections statewide, and major counties in California and Ohio, among other states, have picked the machines.
The report's authors said they had expected a higher degree of security. "We were genuinely surprised at the basic level of the exploits" that allowed tampering, said Mr. Wertheimer, a former security expert for the National Security Agency.
The report supports the findings of a study released in July, by academic security experts at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities, that found Diebold software lacked the level of security needed to safeguard elections. Diebold stated that the code used by the researchers, which had been taken from a company Internet site and circulated online, was outdated. A subsequent report by Science Applications International found some similar problems.
Aviel D. Rubin, who led the Johns Hopkins effort, said, "If our report was unable to convince Maryland that the Diebold machines were vulnerable, then surely this work will set them straight."
The latest study found that some problems identified in the Hopkins study had not been corrected, and discussed other issues it found equally troubling.
Security experts found that the touch-screen voting machines all used the same key to two locks that protect them from tampering. With handheld computers and a little sleight of hand, they also found, the touch screens could be reprogrammed to make a vote for one candidate count for another, or results could be fouled so that a precinct's vote could not be used.
Communications between the terminals and the larger server computers that tabulate results from many precincts do not require that machines on either end of the line prove they are legitimate, which could let someone grab information that could be used to falsify whole precincts' worth of votes.
The group also found that the server computers did not have the latest protection against the security holes in the Microsoft operating systems, and were vulnerable to hacker attacks that would allow an outsider to change software.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
###
