On October 21, 2005 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report titled “Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to be Completed”. A Bi-Partisan effort from the House of Representatives – 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats. They reviewed 80 reports which were selected from a larger number. The GAO did not uncritically accept findings from these references. They state that “where appropriate and feasible, we sought additional context, clarification, and corroboration from the authors, election officials, and security experts.”

Security Problems

The Security and Reliability problems identified by the GAO include: Cast ballots, ballot definition files, and audit logs could be modified. Supervisor functions were protected with weak or easily guessed passwords. Systems had easily picked locks and power switches that were unprotected. Local jurisdictions misconfigured their electronic voting systems, leading to election day problems. Voting systems experienced operational failures during elections. Vendors installed uncertified electronic voting systems.

Operational Defects

The GAO also listed some common concerns with respect to the life cycle of a voting system. They listed weak system security controls and design flaws in the product development stage. In the operations phase, they found poor implementation of security procedures and system failures during elections. They also discuss vague and incomplete security provisions, inadequate requirements for vendor documentation, inadequate security testing and a lack of transparency in the testing process.

Numerous Examples

While the GAO report states that there is lack of consensus on the pervasiveness of the security and reliability problems, they state “Nonetheless, the numerous examples of systems with poor security controls point to a situation in which vendors may not be uniformly building security and reliability into their voting systems, and election officials may not always rigorously ensure the security and reliability of their systems when they acquire, test, operate, and manage them.”

Focus on Security

This report also states that election officials should focus on the security issues related to electronic voting equipment before purchasing or implementing voting systems. Requests for proposals should include security requirements and evaluation and test procedures and election officials should implement relevant mitigation steps to address known security weaknesses. The GAO then goes on to compile a list of best practices in the areas of Operations, Standards, Testing, and Management.

The main conclusions that this report arrives at are: There are well-documented security and reliability problems with existing voting systems. Federal initiatives currently underway will not correct these problems in the near term. Security concerns need to be aggressively addressed by all involved in the election process. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SO ALL OF US WHO VOTE SHOULD BE INVOLVED IN THIS! ***The UNABRIDGED VERSION of this GAO Report can be found on this site at:Links Page:News & Advocacy:Voters Unite.