Black Box Voting
Walk right in, sit right down. Replace vote-counting files with your own.
"Technology transfer for updates!" This is among the benefits in the Diebold PowerPoint sales presentation given to the State of Georgia. Easy updating -- too easy, apparently.
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Recently, technicians and programmers for Diebold Election Systems, the company that supplied every single voting machine for the surprising 2002 results in the state of Georgia, the company that is preparing to convert the state of Maryland to its no-paper-trail computerized voting, admitted to a file-sharing system that amounts to a colossal security flaw.
"Technology transfer for updates!" This is among the benefits in the Diebold PowerPoint sales presentation given to the State of Georgia. Easy updating — too easy, apparently.
Diebold Election Systems, which builds the AccuVote machines, both optical scan and touch-screen, has been parking files on an unprotected public Internet location. Thousands of files were available: election files, hardware and software specifications, program files, voting program patches.
The files on the Diebold FTP server are sensitive. If you want to tamper with election results, you either want to change the program or change the data file. That is why the program files, which control how the votes are tabulated, and the data files, which contain the actual vote count, should not be available for swapping back and forth like recipes on a cookbook site.
And certainly, when you're dealing with files this sensitive, you do make a point of properly training your employees and your contractors on the importance of safeguards. That way you avoid mistakes, even well-intentioned ones. This training would include anticipating how the system might be tampered with, because the history of vote-rigging is long and illustrious. Part of knowing your industry, when you make voting machines, is knowing that people will try to compromise your vote-counting system.
Global Election Systems, which is now Diebold Election Systems, had an obligation to use a secure system. But an independent part-time contractor like Guy Lancaster, who wrote some of the AccuVote software and created the file-swapping system for the election company, might not have realized that $800 million is invested just to push desired candidates into office during key election cycles, or that for 2,000 years, vote-riggers have found ways to manipulate every kind of election system.
Bob Urosevich, who now heads Diebold Election Systems, has been in the voting machine business for 24 years. Diebold, which makes ATM machines (but retained Urosevich when it bought Global Election Systems, and kept the same employees, machines, software and the insecure FTP site) surely had an obligation to implement safeguards. But during Election 2000 and Election 2002, a mechanism was in place that may have thrown Diebold / Global Election System's voting machine security out the window.
I am examining the integrity of current electronic voting systems, and in connection with this we installed a whistleblowers page at the Black Box Voting web site. We've been getting about four new reports a day, and some of them are quite serious. Like this:
Though the address is obscure, people found an unprotected FTP site using a simple Google search. A Global Election Systems web site, located at http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/2256/ contains a list of links like "History," "Press Releases," "Staff" and — amazingly — "FTP."
The FTP button gave total access to anonymous users, allowing anyone to download and apparently, upload to the server. The FTP site contained no copyright statement, asked for no user name, put locks on no directories. Visitors from anywhere in the world could simply walk in the front door. (Have a look at part of the file directory: http://www.blackboxvoting.com/WalkRightIn.html)
"Sometimes our customers use the FTP site to transfer their own files," explains Guy Lancaster, whose web site, says that he developed and maintained the intranet web site for Global Election Systems, now called Diebold Election Systems. "It has been up quite some years. It started when it was Global."
"People go there from counties, cities, sometimes there is stuff there for state certification boards, federal certification, a lot of test material gets passed around," Lancaster explains. Here is part of my interview with Guy Lancaster on Feb. 4, 2003:
Harris: "Would you know if someone came to your FTP, or replaced files at your FTP?"
Lancaster: "Well, we have recently just discontinued what's considered anonymous access, so people could before, yes, but now we use a different means…"
Harris: "It was available during the 2002 election?"
Lancaster: "I think so."
In fact, Diebold Election Systems' FTP site was unprotected as recently as January 29, 2003.
I wondered how easy it might be to download a file, alter it, and upload it. Apparently that idea hadn't occurred to Lancaster, who ran the site. "The site is just a means for transferring stuff between people," he said. I called James Rellinger, the independent contractor who built the Georgia computer network for Diebold. "It's part of the interoffice transfer of files as they are being worked on...That FTP server is like a garage or workbench," said Rellinger.
But you rarely find the innards of an election system that can tip control of Congress, or elect the president of the United States, on a workbench in a garage. The AccuVote files, however, were freely shared and sometimes snagged from the FTP and e-mailed to election workers and technicians. Files on the FTP site included hardware and software specifications, election results files, the vote-counting program itself, and "replacement files" for Diebold's GEMS vote-counting system and for the Windows software underlying the system. In fact, anyone with a modem could have hunkered over a computer to download, upload or slightly change and overwrite the files on Diebold's FTP site.
While not all of us use words like "FTP" and "program patch" around the house, the high tech community instantly understood the implications of this kind of file swapping.
"The ability to install patches or new software that wasn't certified has many risks, including the introduction of new bugs and more opportunities for tampering. It is even more risky if different patches can be installed at the last minute in particular jurisdictions," says David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University.
"This opens the possibility of customized tampering by people who know exactly which races they want to affect, or bugs that are even less likely to be caught because they only occur in a small number of locations," says Dill. "Of course, even if the certified code is frozen, it is easy to think of ways that undetectable back-doors could be installed in the software so that someone at the election site could choose the winner of the election." Dill has put out an urgent call for voting machine reform (http://verify.stanford.edu/evote.html), recently endorsed by 115 leading computer scientists. (Here's the list: http://verify.stanford.edu/dill/EVOTE/endorsements.html)
Some files at Diebold's FTP site had simple "zip" passwords attached to them, but dozens had no protection at all. And even the passwords, Lancaster said in his October, 2000 e-mail, were easy to guess. "I can find no way of authenticating a PIN without revealing enough information to crack it," he says, adding that he was beginning to think it was impossible to make the system secure.
If Lancaster — who is just a part-time independent contractor — knew there was a problem, senior management must also have known, because employees at their McKinney, Texas headquarters were also using the insecure FTP file transfer system.
Sources familiar with the site voiced concerns about many of the files. Unfortunately, I can't read a lick of code, but apparently computer enthusiasts have been surreptitiously downloading the Diebold files and examining them quietly. When the Black Box Voting whistleblower page went live recently, geek-reports began flowing.
One source who had seen the hardware manual called in with a terse question: "Why would we want a utility that can duplicate memory cards in optical scan voting machines? Are the cards serialized? Are they serialized internally? Is it hard-wired into the card?" Apparently something he'd read in those FTP files had gotten him all riled up about a memory card duplication utility.
Our attention was drawn to a curiously named file named rob-georgia. Our first thought was that a Georgia technician must be named Rob. I asked various Diebold employees if anyone named Rob works at the company. Lancaster thought there might be a salesman in California with that name. A Diebold employee named Kerry Martin told me that there was no technician in Georgia named Rob.
Another source pointed out that one of the names on the Diebold FTP files, Kerry Martin, happens to be the same name as the poll worker who did press interviews after the flubbed Florida primary election in September 2002, when ES&S machines (Diebold's main competitor) did not operate properly.
So I spoke with Kerry Martin at Diebold's McKinney, Texas site. He initially denied being a technician, telling me he was in sales, but when I asked him about the folders named "Kerry Martin" on the FTP site, he admitted that he also does technical support. Martin said he was in Norfolk Virginia, not Florida, last September, and I have so far been unable to locate the poll worker named Kerry Martin in Florida.
Some of the folders named "Kerry Martin" have files in them that say things like "Replace GEMS files with these." So I asked Martin about program patches:
Harris: "Don't all the programs used in these machines need to be certified? It seems that people are uploading and downloading files at this FTP site and using them in elections."
Martin: "Certain hardware things and certain software things, most of them, you only are allowed to use the certified version."
Harris: "Why, then, would you have files that say 'replace the files with these?'"
Martin: "Replace all the files with these — normally that could be a Windows thing."
Harris: "…you guys have a file on your FTP that says "Replace the GEMS files with these."
Martin: "Replace the GEMS files … I don't know what that would be."
Well, GEMS is the main program. It stands for Global Election Management Systems, and it contains the vote-counting program itself.
Another source pointed out that she saw various versions of the vote-counting program itself on the FTP site. Apparently you launch the program with a file called GEMS.exe. All such programs are to be certified on both the national and state level. The program is not supposed to be changed without recertification. The FTP site contains at least four versions of the GEMS.exe files with 2002 dates. The files are not quite the same size.
According to a source familiar with Windows security issues, file names on the Diebold FTP site indicate that some AccuVote software runs on the Windows 95/98 platform. Even Microsoft recommends using other platforms when security is at issue.
I called Bob Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems (also founder of ES&S, a competing voting machine company). After my third call to ask for his comments, his assistant said Urosevich had the message. "If he wants to talk to you, he'll call you," she said. Apparently Urosevich had nothing to say about the election security glitch.
Tech-savvy citizens, however, have a lot to say about the risks of an open FTP site, and the files it contains.
One thing is certain: No matter what our political affiliation, no matter which issues we support, we are unanimous on the fact that voting must be at the heart of a democratic system. And to achieve that, our vote-counting program must be trustworthy.
— Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century. This article is copyright by Bev Harris, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this credit is attached.
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