WILL ALL OF CONNECTICUT'S VOTES BE COUNTED IN NOVEMBER?

Will all of Connecticut's votes be counted in November? The
public is invited to find out at a forum on July 7th sponsored by the
Fairfield Democratic Town Committee. As the election integrity
movement grows, concerns are raised about the safety and security of
Connecticut's new voting machine, the Accuvote. Can its memory card
be easily corrupted? Can vote totals be changed? Are there
safeguards that can prevent our vote from being manipulated?

Guest speakers will be:

• Deputy Secretary of State Lesley Mara, Deputy Secretary of State since January 2006 UCONN Law School (honors), 1986 Smith College, 1983
  http://www.ct.gov/sots/site/default.asp;

• Founder of CT Voters Count Luther Weeks, Retired Software Engineer and Computer Scientist Masters Degrees in Computer Science and Business
  Undergraduate degree in Mathematics, http://www.ctvoterscount.org ; and,

• Dr. Alex Shvartsman, UCONN professor, who oversees the state's technical safety issues for Accuvote, http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~aas .

The forum will include 10 minutes of HBO's "Hacking Democracy", statements from the three speakers, and then questions from the public.

For further information about the forum, please call Jody Eisemann at 203-254-6596 or Coralee Reiss at 203-254-2765.

DIRECTIONS to Osborn Hill -
I-95 North: Exit 22 Round Hill Rd., Straight at stop. Left at light
(North Benson Road). Follow North Benson approximately 2 miles, stay
right at V in Road. Osborn Hill will is one block past the V, on your
left I-95 South: Exit 22 North Benson Road. Take a right at the
light. Follow as above from North Benson. Merritt Parkway (N or S):
Exit 44, Rt. #58 (Fairfield University Exit), follow Rt. 58 South
(Black Rock Turnpike) approximately 2 miles. Turn right onto Stillson
Road. Osborn Hill will be on your right.

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Source Code Review of The Diebold Voting System

July 20, 2007 by the University of California, Berkeley

Princeton University: Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman,

J. Alex Halderman, Harlan Yu, and William P. Zeller

University of California, Berkeley: David Wagner

This report was prepared by the University of California,
Berkley, under contract to the California Secretary of State as part
of a "Top-to-Bottom" review of electronic voting systems certified for
use in the State of California. As a result, the State of California
decertified the Accuvote. More information is available at
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm This is the
Conclusion of the report.

Conclusion

Our study of the Diebold source code found that the system
does not meet the requirements for a security-critical system. It is
built upon an inherently fragile design and suffers from
implementation flaws that can expose the entire voting system to
attacks. These vulnerabilities, if exploited, could jeopardize voter
privacy and the integrity of elections. An attack could plausibly be
accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a
single voting machine.

The damage could be extensive – malicious code could spread
to every voting machine in polling places and to county election
servers. Even with a paper trail, malicious code might be able to
subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by
causing widespread equipment failure on election day. We conclude
that these problems arose because of a failure to design and build the
system with security as a central focus, which led to the inconsistent
application of accepted security engineering practices. For this
reason, the safest way to repair the Diebold system is to reengineer
it so that it is secure by design.

We discussed a number of limited solutions and procedural
changes that may improve the security of the system, but we warn that
implementing any particular set of technical or procedural safeguards
may still be insufficient. Similarly, fixing individual flaws in the
system – even all of the issues identified in this report – may not
yield a secure voting system, because of the possibility that
unidentified problems will be exploited. We are also concerned that
future updates to the system may introduce new, unknown
vulnerabilities or fail to adequately correct known ones. We urge the
state to conduct further studies to determine whether any new or
updated voting systems are secure.