Closing your article with a voting machine vendor's comment dismissive of the findings of the Ohio project EVEREST leaves a false impression that there is some debate about the security and reliability of electronic voting machines. The indisputable truth is that e-voting is not and never has been secure. Election integrity is too important an issue for "he said" "she said" journalism. True the EVEREST study may be said to have been incomplete. Had the project been extended they would in all likelihood have found many more places where security could be breached. Stephen Spoonamore a renowned cyber security expert and life long Republican states unambiguously that electronic voting machines cannot be made secure. He provides a stunning indictment of the electronic voting machine industry in a video interview on velvetrevolution.us.
A summary of project EVEREST report is available on Jennifer Brunner's website. Like the countless credible, critical, reviews of electronic voting machines that preceded it, EVEREST found numerous serious security vulnerabilities in basic electronic voting machine system design and implementation. The academic reviewers on the EVEREST team describe the electronic voting system put in place under former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell as possessing "critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election." As part of the EVEREST project, MicroSolved, Inc. (MSI), performed penetration tests of three voting machines systems in use in Ohio: Premier (Diebold), ES &S and Hart. MSI's Executive Summary report concluded that all three vendors had failed to adopt, implement and follow "even the most basic set of information security guidelines" used in other industries.
MSI uncovered a myriad of common vulnerabilities and weaknesses many of which have been known for several years and still exist in the system components. They reported that many components lacked basic security controls such as firewalls, antivirus and other mechanisms for protecting system integrity.
Princeton computer scientist Ed Felten considered the EVEREST report to be the scariest e-voting security report yet. He questioned how the ES&S iVotronic touchscreen voting machine ever got certified, noting that a machine with so many design errors must be susceptible to misrecording or miscounting votes due to ordinary glitches that plague computer systems. He considered the iVotronic too risky to use even if all poll workers and voters were angels. Among the many potential touchscreen security breaches that alarmed Felten was an undocumented backdoor function that allows a voter or poll worker to alter vote totals using a magnet and a personal digital assistant.
If our election outcomes are to be decided by competing hackers or election insiders who infect electronic voting machines with computer viruses then our democracy is history.

Teresa Blakely

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