Another Red Flag That Paperless E-Voting Is Flawed, and Dangerous

The Open Voting Foundation (HT Techdirt) did an investigation (bold is mine), and has the pictures:

“This may be the worst security flaw we have seen in touch screen voting machines,” says Open Voting Foundation president, Alan Dechert. Upon examining the inner workings of one of the most popular paperless touch screen voting machines used in public elections in the United States, it has been determined that with the flip of a single switch inside, the machine can behave in a completely different manner compared to the tested and certified version.

“Diebold has made the testing and certification process practically irrelevant,” according to Dechert. “If you have access to these machines and you want to rig an election, anything is possible with the Diebold TS — and it could be done without leaving a trace. All you need is a screwdriver.” This model does not produce a voter verified paper trail so there is no way to check if the voter’s choices are accurately reflected in the tabulation.

….. The most serious issue is the ability to choose between “EPROM” and “FLASH” boot configurations. Both of these memory sources are present. All of the switches in question (JP2, JP3, JP8, SW2 and SW4) are physically present on the board. It is clear that this system can ship with live boot profiles in two locations, and switching back and forth could change literally everything regarding how the machine works and counts votes. This could be done before or after the so-called “Logic And Accuracy Tests”.

A third possible profile could be field-added in minutes and selected in the “external flash” memory location, the interface for which is present on the motherboard.

No company would accept using a computer system to help coordinate and manage its day-to-day operations that was so insecure. Why in the world are these flawed systems being used to tabulate votes, without a paper trail?