Testimony of Diana Finch
Governmental
Operations Committee Hearing
April
24, 2006
My name is Diana Finch, I am a resident of the
Bronx. I am a literary agent working with
·
Greg Palast, investigative journalist and author
of THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY
·
Professor Steven Freeman of the University of
Pennsylvania who is co-authoring a book on discrepancies between exit polls and
official vote counts
·
Blair Bobier, whose legal pursuit of a recount
after the 2004 debacle in Ohio will go to trial in August 2006.
Computer security is impossible to control.
The most secure installations in the world have
been broken into, repeatedly.
·
American financial companies have seen millions
of accounts compromised
·
Our Department of Defense has been broken into.
·
The FBI’s Computer Crime Survey of 2005 was
deleted from their web site, leaving them with only a paper copy.
The FBI’s report said that nearly 90% of
companies were broken into last year. 44% had intrusions by insiders.
How will our Board of Elections stack up against
these computer industry statistics?
Insiders – who are they?
If bi-partisan staff do all the work, and look
over each other’s shoulders every minute of the day, we might be safe on the
insider-tampering threat. But the Harri Hursti Hack in Florida and the RABA Red
Team test in Maryland showed that computerized voting systems were not designed
for security, and in fact they have pre-programmed “back doors” that facilitate
tampering. In all such tests, the tester has been able to alter tallies with a
few seconds or minutes access to the system.
We should assume that if our Board of Elections
has vendor technicians on the premises, it is predictable they will have
unsupervised access to systems. That is called “no security.”
Our Board of Elections has already had to hire
outside help, Gartner, just to get ready for computerized voting. No one
believes that they can handle computerized voting systems solely with inside
bipartisan staff.
Many break-ins are accomplished via the communications
capability in the computers. This way, the insider or outside hacker
doesn’t even have to be in the same room with one of the computers. He or she
can be in another state, or another country.
Wireless
communications used to require an extra card plugged into one of the slots on
the computer. But now the same capability can be invisible – embedded in the
touchscreen, or just one more tiny silver dot somewhere inside the machine.
Our
Board of Elections is not taking the tampering threat seriously. This means two
things, First, they will not take precautions against this kind of tampering.
Second, even if they did, they would fall into those industry statistics from
the FBI, nearly 90% broken into, 44% by insiders.
In the highly competitive
atmosphere of electoral politics, we can’t just assume that everyone involved
will always be a saint. And it is
foolish to use computerized voting, because the technology is too insecure to
be suitable.
In contrast, the security of paper ballots is
simple to ensure if we have the political will to do so.
I urge this committee to pass two simple
resolutions:
131 - to
urge our NYC Board of Elections to switch to paper-ballot optical scan.voting
systems, our low-tech, more manageable, more secure option
228 – to urge public Mock Election tests before
purchase. If the systems work, let’s see it. So far our Board of Elections has
had vendors come in and provide little demonstrations of non-working mockups.
It is unclear whether or not working prototypes even exist.
Thank you.