“The nation’s top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them,” Kim Zetter reports for Motherboard.
“In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had ‘provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,’ which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them,” Zetter reports. “The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold.”
“ES&S is the top voting machine maker in the country, a position it held in the years 2000-2006 when it was installing pcAnywhere on its systems. The company’s machines were used statewide in a number of states, and at least 60 percent of ballots cast in the US in 2006 were tabulated on ES&S election-management systems,” Zetter reports. “The company told Wyden it stopped installing pcAnywhere on systems in December 2007, after the Election Assistance Commission, which oversees the federal testing and certification of election systems used in the US, released new voting system standards. Those standards required that any election system submitted for federal testing and certification thereafter could contain only software essential for voting and tabulation… Wyden told Motherboard that installing remote-access software and modems on election equipment ‘is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sheesh.
With today’s security technology, no country in the world is able to provide a secure Internet voting system. — Harri Hursti, May 2014
SEE ALSO:
Bernie Sanders camp suspicious of Microsoft’s influence in Iowa Caucus – January 28, 2016
U.S. Election Day Tech: What could possibly go wrong? – November 4, 2008
Serious security flaws found in Diebold electronic voting machines – May 15, 2006