- A state election official said Thursday he is "very
confident" in the security of Georgia's new touch-screen voting system,
despite a study that concluded it is highly vulnerable to fraud.
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- "My confidence in this system is the same as it
was... before I read the report," said Michael Barnes, assistant elections
director in the secretary of state's office.
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- Barnes was in charge of Georgia's statewide rollout in
November.
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- The study was released by computer experts Thursday.
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- It found "significant security flaws" with
the system designed by Diebold Election Systems and used in several states.
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- The study was the first review of the software by independent
researchers.
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- The system was vulnerable to unscrupulous voters as well
as "insiders such as poll workers, software developers and even janitors,"
who could cast multiple votes without a trace, the study said.
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- Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University, a lead researcher
on the study, said there is no quick fix for the software.
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- "You would have to start over," Rubin said.
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- Georgia's Barnes, however, said that the review ignored
election protocol and pre-election testing.
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- It also ignored hardware features and other measures
designed to protect the system, he said.
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- "If you look at a Picasso, you might look at one
corner and think the whole thing is ugly, but when you look at the whole
picture as it's meant to be presented, you realize it's beautiful,"
he said.
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- Mike Jacobsen, a spokesman for Diebold, based in North
Canton, Ohio, declined to comment in detail until company officials had
more time to review the study. But he said the company's systems "pass
rigorous certification tests at the federal and state governmental levels."
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- Jacobsen also said that the software analyzed in the
study was about a year old and that problems with it might have been fixed.
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- Barnes added that the version studied was not the one
approved for use in Georgia.
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- Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox championed touch-screen
voting after learning that the state had had more uncounted votes during
the 2000 presidential election than even Florida.
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- Cox persuaded Georgia officials to install the $54 million
system statewide for the November 2002 election, in which Gov. Sonny Perdue
upset incumbent Roy Barnes. The system is used in several states, including
Maryland, California and Kansas.
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- The researchers were critical of an ATM-like card given
to each voter to make sure the voter casts only one ballot. A voter easily
could bring a specially programmed counterfeit card to the polls and use
it to cast multiple votes, they said.
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- The researchers concluded that the system was vulnerable
to anyone from a group of poll workers to a foreign government wanting
to influence an election.
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- The findings were based on a July study of the computer
code used in the voting system. The code was posted anonymously on the
Internet earlier this year.
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- -The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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- © 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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- http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/0703/25voting.html
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