It's not who
votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." Joseph Stalin.
Vote fraud expert Bev Harris has warned that New Hampshire's
electronic voting machines are wide open to fraud and that even
modestly skilled computer programmers were able to identify key
vulnerabilities within ten minutes of assessing them as key Democrat
and Republican primaries unfold today.
The contract for programming all of New Hampshire's Diebold voting
machines, which combined will count 81 per cent of the vote today,
is owned by LHS Associates, which also holds the contracts for
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont.
LHS is owned by John Silvestro, who has been at the center of a
long-running public dispute in trying to deflect accusations made by
hacker Harri Hursti that the machines can easily be rigged.
"The exact
same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project
in Leon County is used throughout New Hampshire, where about 45
percent of elections administrators hand count paper ballots at the
polling place, with the remaining locations all using the Diebold
version 1.94w optical scan machine,"
writes Harris.
One area of disagreement between Hursti and Silvestro was the amount
of expertise needed to exploit the Diebold 1.94w optical scan
system. Silvestro claimed (in a strange contortion of reasoning)
that he doesn't hire very skilled programmers, implying that this
makes New Hampshire elections more secure.
Hursti pointed out that hiring programmers with a lack of knowledge
is generally not considered a security feature, and also that an
average high schooler can learn to exploit the system in two days to
two weeks.
In this You Tube video, Silvestro constantly interrupts Hursti's
testimony in front of the New Hampshire legislative.
After
purchasing a Diebold 1.94w machine, a computer repair shop employee
picked at random by Black Box Voting was able to zero in on the
system's vulnerable memory card within just ten minutes.
Harris points out that LHS is a private company that will count over
four fifths of the New Hampshire vote with no oversight whatsoever.
LHS is not subject to public records requirements, as the government
is, at least, not in New Hampshire. The control over memory card
contents is absolute; when cards malfunction or get lost, LHS brings
the replacements.
Since LHS maintains the machines, repairs the machines, and replaces
the machines -- often on Election Day -- when they malfunction, they
have intimate access to the chips, sockets, ports, communications
devices and other electronic components.
A recent CNN report featured on Lou Dobbs' show highlights just how
easy it is to hack a voting machine and change how votes are tallied
with just rudimentary programming skills. Experts warn that it takes
only a minute for an unsupervised machine to be inserted with a
virus and hacked.
