According to Brad Friedman of Brad Blog fame, the reason voters in Sarasota were unable to vote for two hours last Fall was because the computer virus worm known as “Slammer” infected the database for Sarasota County, the same county which was the locus of the contested federal election between Democratic candidate Christine Jennings and Republican candidate Vern Buchanan.
In the early afternoon hours on Monday, Oct. 23, 2006, an Internet worm slammed into the county’s database system, breaching its firewall and overwriting the system’s administrative password. The havoc brought the county’s network — and the electronic voting system which relies on it — to its knees as Internet access was all but lost at voting locations for two hours that afternoon. Voters in one of the nation’s most hotly contested Congressional elections were unable to cast ballots during the outage, since officials were unable to verify registration data. […]
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In a separate document, titled “Conduct of Election Report, Sarasota County General Election, November 7, 2006” there are two different Internet service outages mentioned, though the viral attack described in the Sarasota County database security team’s report — the attack that was presumably the source of one of those outages — is not described or even mentioned specifically in that report. It’s still unclear what the second incident referred to in that report may be. […]
Though most systems vulnerable to the attack have since been patched by a fix provided by Microsoft prior to the initial 2003 attack, the Sarasota County machine that was attacked and subsequently spread an infection that overtook the network infrastructure “was completely unpatched. Essentially it was missing five years’ worth of security updates,” according to the October 24, 2006, incident report. […]
[Q]uestions remain about whether the incident was disclosed to the parties challenging the election via discovery. In several previous instances, documents believed relevant to the case were found to have been withheld from the plaintiff’s attorneys by the Sarasota Election Supervisors office. […]
Though the worm intrusion occurred on the first day of early voting, two weeks prior to Election Day on Nov. 7, major structural changes called for in the wake of the attack were postponed until after Election Day according to both the incident report and an e-mail sent on Nov. 8 to John Kennedy, network administrator for the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections office.[…]
Republican Vern Buchanan was ultimately certified as the winner over Democrat Jennings by just 369 votes. An ongoing investigation by state officials has been unable to determine the cause of some 18,000 so-called undervotes (votes that were reportedly cast but not recorded) registered only on Democratic-leaning Sarasota’s touch-screen voting systems.
The unusually high undervote rate, approximately 18% of the total, has been the subject of much speculation. Normal undervote rates — in the neighborhood of 2% — were reported for other races in Sarasota that used the same touch-screen ballots as the ones with the 18,000 undervotes in the Buchanan-Jennings contest. The undervote rate was also around 2% in absentee voting that used paper ballots for the same election in the same county.
Does anyone still wonder why people don’t trust computers and electronic voting machines to count our votes accurately? Or in the partisan and/or possibly corrupt elections officials responsible for insuring that our election results are valid and verifiable. Two weeks notice of security flaws and nothing done until after election day? Other security incidents not mentioned? How sure are the voters in Florida’s 13th District that the right person is representing them in Congress? If I were among them, I’d be screaming for a new election — on paper ballots.
As the saying goes, please read the entire article. Then write or call your Congressperson or State Representative and ask them to support a bill to eliminate electronic voting in its entirety.
