November 4th, 2008
GOP gearing up legal attack on e-voting machines
According to TPM Muckraker and this press release, the Republican National Committee is lining up the computer forensics firm Forensicon to provide analysis on e-voting machines to form the basis of a legal attack against the validity of the 2008 presidential election.
Briefly, Forensicon’s press release says:
[it] was contacted last Thursday by a security firm lining up vendors to assist the Republican National Committee with consulting related to potential allegations of computerized voter fraud. It has been widely reported that electronic voting machines in many states are vulnerable to hacking by anyone with the right equipment and a few minutes’ access to the voting machine.
I said yesterday that I don’t believe that e-voting machine irregularities will significantly alter the vote, and I stand by that statement. Assuming that e-voting machines are randomly distributed across the country, clustered in both left leaning and right leaning urban areas, and not designed to support one party or the other, there is no reason that the devices can affect the quality of the vote. I also pointed out that legal challenges will be moot as long as the winning party secures a significant margin in the contested state. The press release appears to concur with this sentiment:
If the election returns vary significantly from the polled numbers in any precincts that proves crucial to the election outcome, I expect that a legal struggle over the validity of the election results will ensue.
If this challenge goes through, it may be several weeks before we know who will be our next president.
Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000. He currently is the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark, a messaging security company located in San Francisco. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Zero Day via Email alerts or RSS.
