California Decertifies Iowa’s Favorite Touchscreen
In a late-night press conference convened just before the Friday midnight deadline for voting system changes before next spring’s primary election, Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced widespread decertification of most types of electronic voting equipment used in California, including the Diebold TSx, which is also widely used in Iowa.
The withdrawal of certification for the equipment was the culmination of a complete top-to-bottom review of all election systems used in California. In her campaign for Secretary of State last fall, Ms Bowen, a former state senator, had promised a thorough study of the state’s voting systems, which she set in motion immediately upon taking office last January. The review consisted of four separate studies encompassing all aspects of the system: security, accessibility, system software, and a review of official documents related to the equipment.
“Secretary of State Bowen took the only responsible course of action in light of the severity of the study’s findings,” said Robert Ferraro, a Co-Director of SAVE Our Votes, a grass-roots citizens’ group working for Secure, Accessible, Verifiable Elections in Maryland.
The decertifications will prohibit the use of most Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) voting equipment, often referred to as touch-screen machines, except for those used in early voting and one in each precinct to provide accessibility for voters with disabilities. These DREs have been conditionally reapproved under stringent conditions for their use, including a requirement to handcount all of the voter-verified paper print-outs from the machines instead of using the electronic votes tallied by the machine. California already requires each voting machine to provide a voterverified paper record of each vote for use in audits and recounts of election results. A paper trail bill also passed in Iowa this spring.
While many of the reports’ findings reconfirm vulnerabilities revealed in previous studies, some shocked even the computer experts who performed those earlier reviews. Dr. Aviel Rubin, a computer security expert at Johns Hopkins University who scrutinized voting source code from Diebold Election Systems, Inc. in 2003 commented on his blog, “In all cases, the analysts were able to rewrite the firmware on the machines. This means that an attacker could change every aspect of the behavior of the voting systems….There are many other examples of attack that are much more serious than what I expected from this report — and I was expecting a lot.”
The full reports from California are posted.
This post adapted from a press release by Robert Ferraro.