Election Fraud: Is California Vulnerable?

There is a lot of buzz over a new report by a Princeton University computer science professor and two students who hacked into a Diebold voting machine and manipulated the results.

The trio obtained a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine, created a virus and downloaded it into the machine using a memory card inserted into a locked hatch on the side. They found:

"Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss."

Diebold says the report is flawed because its authors hacked old software and went through numerous locks and security tags, something a precinct worker might easily notice.

Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation says California doesn't use the Diebold system in question and requires a paper trail for each vote. (This is in part because she pestered the state for years.)

But Alexander says this problem remains:

"California has a voter-verified paper audit trail law, as well as a law requiring random audits. However, California's 'manual count' law, which mandates a public recount of the ballots from one percent of each county's precincts, may not be sufficient to detect fraud or error. The one percent level was set back in 1965, when voting systems were still largely paper-based. In light of the physical and technical insecurities we now know of in Diebold's electronic voting systems, the percentage of ballots to be recounted in California needs to be increased to mitigate the new risks. Another and perhaps better way to avoid these risks is to rely primarily on paper ballot voting systems in the first place."

Extremely close elections do occur in California. Republican Tom McClintock came within 23/100th of one percent of Democrat Steve Westly in the 2002 state Controller's race, the closest margin in state history.