EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Stanley A. Klein
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | * Voting systems have been clearly and repeatedly demonstrated to be seriously insecure and vulnerable to malicious tampering. We need to view the fraudulent takeover of government power by cybercriminal stealth just as seriously as we view the wrongful takeover of government power by force and violence. In a 4year election cycle, roughly $2 Billion to $3 Billion is spent to influence the outcome of elections. If ruthless, unscrupulous interests diverted just a single digit percentage of that money to developing and executing technically sophisticated attacks on voting systems, the aggregate expenditure could exceed a quarter billion dollars. This is not just an abstract possibility some individuals, reporters, and researchers have alleged that attacks at various levels of sophistication have already affected results in recent Federal and state elections. Valid or not, these allegations are within the envelope of technical/operational feasibility. The VVSG is weak in the area of security. This is exacerbated by its failure to include the kind of serious, intensive, mandatory testing for security vulnerability that, for almost 30 years, has been required of other systems of critical national importance. This failure effectively neutralizes and negates even its new requirements that might otherwise be improvements.