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E-Voting System Approval Delayed

Posted on: Wednesday, 21 December 2005, 09:00 CST

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

In the wake of successful vote-hacking tests in Florida, California is putting off approval of Diebold's latest voting system until the firm has critical software evaluated by an outside lab.

Diebold Election Systems relies on its own, nonstandard software language, known as AccuBasic, to program local election details into virtually all of its voting machines, using memory cards or PC cards. Voting system experts say the practice appears to violate federal voting system standards, and independent computer experts have been using Diebold's own code to hack vote totals in its machines.

On Tuesday, California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson cited "unresolved significant security concerns" in ordering Diebold to submit the software on its memory cards and PC cards to a designated testing lab for review.

Such reviews typically take weeks to months and stand to cost Diebold market share in California, which buys more voting equipment than any other state. A third of the state's counties have been planning or considering use of Diebold's latest system for the 2006 elections, including Los Angeles, Alameda, San Diego, San Joaquin and Marin counties.

All California counties face Jan. 1 state and federal deadlines to purchase voting systems that are handicapped accessible and produce a paper record for recounts. Many counties now are unlikely to meet that deadline. County elections officials also typically want to have a new voting system in hand four to six months before an election.

McPherson's order could prompt counties to look at other voting systems.

Diebold officials said they "look forward to reviewing (California's) new certification requirements."

"We have always complied with what the state has requested of us and will treat this new request in the same spirit of cooperation," David Byrd, Diebold Election Systems vice president of business operations, said in a statement.

The California move is not actually a new requirement. At least one private laboratory, known as an "independent testing authority," is supposed to perform a line-by-line review of all software used in Diebold's voting systems, to check for compliance with federal standards.

Those rules forbid the use of nonstandard programming languages and prohibit the insertion of executable programs on a system after it has been approved. Like past systems, Diebold's latest system uses nonstandard language and can change voting-machine software after approval.

But in a letter Tuesday to Diebold, California's McPherson said the memory cards and PC cards containing the programs never were reviewed by the testing labs.

PC cards can be reprogrammed by a laptop, and Diebold's memory cards can be rewritten by a $500 scanner used to measure crop moisture. Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti used such a crop scanner to retool Diebold memory cards and both add and subtract votes on a Diebold optical scan machine in Leon County, Fla. The county's elections supervisor, Ion Sancho, rejected Diebold last week, and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has called for a reexamination of the way Florida tests voting systems.

McPherson said Tuesday that California and other states are "at a critical crossroads" for voting systems.

"We must take every available step to ensure the security and integrity of every vote cast in this new electronic age," he said in a statement.

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com.

Source: Oakland Tribune

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