Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States

Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States

The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.

In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.

The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees, … including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said.

Of course.

Who in that company thought this was a good idea?

Absurd.

I still think paper ballots are the best. And then there's watchers watching the ballot counters, and watchers watching the first watchers, and all ballots are kept for some time.....much harder to hack.
And if watchers are needed to watch the watchers that are watching the first watchers of the ballot counters, add them in too....

a reply to: loam

Conveniently nobody learn't anything from the 2000 election.

But lets say Russian influence was so great that it threatens the US democratic process!!!

Florida 200 Election case study

freepress.org...

Based on exclusive reporting by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, and by award-winning journalist Greg Palast, the Nation Magazine reported that Florida Governor Jeb Bush (brother of GOP candidate George W. Bush) electronically purged Florida’s voter registration lists in a partisan manner. He used a secret proprietary computer program from a $4 million contract with Database Technologies (DBT) recently merged with ChoicePoint Inc. of Atlanta, which was the only bidder, to coordinate the definitive electronic purge. ChoicePoint has strong right-wing ties among its Board of Directors.

The contract was awarded in 1998 by a Republican legislature in league with then-Secretary of State Sandra Mothram, who later became Jeb Bush’s Lieutenant Governor. That August, Mortham was warned by the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections that there was a botched rush “to capriciously take names off the rolls.”

The purge involved 90,000 or more duly registered Florida voters, very far more than the 537 votes that allegedly decided the election for George W. Bush.

a reply to: loam

Remote access, wifi and ethernet connections should never be on a voting machine. Also, as many computer experts have claimed, their voting machines should be audited and preferably, use secure open source solutions. Basically, it should be a secure black-box which, like paper ballot boxes, should be then removed to a secure location to have the votes recorded. IMHO, this is by design. It's easier to forge bits and bytes than it is to mess with huge piles of paper. (Although arguably that too is possible.)

"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." (Joseph Stalin)

ETA Playing chess on a voting machine Article is dated 2007. Yeah...

If there was a blockchain for voting. There would never be an issue.

Everything would be there in the open to verify.

Just need to make sure that the voting is anonymous.

Jim Schmidt works @ ES&S. Would it be interesting if there was a connection to Eric Schmidt from Alphabet/Google.

www.essvote.com...

originally posted by: grey580
If there was a blockchain for voting. There would never be an issue.

Everything would be there in the open to verify.

Just need to make sure that the voting is anonymous.

That's an interesting idea.
Each and every voter would get a vote-reciept they could check against the system to make sure their vote didn't change.

Of course, there's still no way to check that there aren't 11 million dead folks voting without keeping a daabase of who votes for what... which of course would just be hacked and published.
Might be onto something, though.

a reply to: lordcomac

The blockchain would keep track of all of that.

Dead people vote now. So what's the difference? lol

With all of the talk about hardening our election process, why is this not front page news?

originally posted by: snowspirit
I still think paper ballots are the best. And then there's watchers watching the ballot counters, and watchers watching the first watchers, and all ballots are kept for some time.....much harder to hack.
And if watchers are needed to watch the watchers that are watching the first watchers of the ballot counters, add them in too....

The State of Virginia switched to new systems prior to the 2016 elections. The new system requires the voter to mark a paper ballot and put the ballot into a reader. If the system can't read the ballot it is returned to the voter for correction. Otherwise the vote is recorded electronically.

If the electronic vote total is molested, there is a full paper trail to reconstruct the actual vote. I'm not sure what other security practices are in place to prevent election fraud. However, I would assume that since the state invested so much money in replacing voting machines, they must have also implemented better handling and chain-of-custody practices.

I found it interesting that a lot of people that voted using the new technology were dismayed that the government had "gone backwards" in requiring them to mark paper ballots, rather than just pushing the button for the candidate of their choice. My attempts to explain to them how this was a much better method that provided a paper trail to prevent election fraud just fell on deaf ears.

-dex