Hey! Great news! Just in time to practice up your hacking skills before the 2014 mid-term elections, you can now buy your very own ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system from eBay!…
Yes, the very same voting systems that are so incredibly sensitive and vulnerable to tampering (and which have failed so often in so many states and in so many elections) that both election officials and Elections Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) have long attempted to keep them out of the hands of the public, can now be yours for just $499.99 or “Best Offer” via eBay! And that includes Free Shipping!
And, oh, look! One of them is already sold!…
The systems, according to the eBay ad, are used, but in “GREAT WORKING CONDITION”. The Illinois-based seller, Gadgets Plus, tells The BRAD BLOG the systems were last used in Clay County, Florida which, according to VerifiedVoting.org’s Verifier database, still uses the iVotronic for disabled-accessible voting — or did in 2012, in any case.
The ES&S iVotronic, in case you’d like to practice your hacking and election theft skills for any reason, is among the most widely used touch-screen voting systems in the country and its made by the largest e-voting system vendor in the world! According to Verified Voting, the 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems were used in 2012 in 403 voting jurisdictions across all or parts of 18 states, including Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.
In addition to being amongst the most — if not the most — ubiquitous unverifiable electronic touch-screen voting system in the nation, the iVotronic has played a starring role in such elections as the one which secured the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in SC for the completely unknown and largely illiterate Alvin Greene in 2010. It was also the system on which 18,000 votes simply vanished in Sarasota, FL in 2006, handing the special FL-13 U.S. House election to Republican Vern Buchanan by just 369 votes. And, of course, there are still those unexplained impossible election results from Monroe County, AR in 2010 among many other memorable iVotronic moments we could worry you with.
When asked about the possibility of an iVotronic being made available for anyone in the public to work with, Joe Lorenzo Hall, Chief Technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology warned The BRAD BLOG “If a voting machine were to fall into the ‘wrong’ hands, there is probably quite a bit a bad guy could learn in order to plan and design future attacks on such a machine.”
Hall, who worked on two different state-sponsored landmark studies of e-voting systems in California and Ohio (both of which found myriad security vulnerabilities in every single system tested), cited two different cases in the past where computer scientist and security experts obtained voting systems made by different vendors (Diebold and Sequoia) and were then able to use them to discover serious security vulnerabilities which could have been exploited during live elections.
“In both these cases,” he explained, “despite very different designs, they were able to change votes and write a machine-specific virus that would allow fraudulent vote counts and spread silently from machine to machine over the course of a few elections.”
The instance Hall cited involving a Diebold Accuvote touch-screen system was a story we originally broke in 2006, after obtaining the system from an insider source and sharing it with computer scientists at Princeton.
“While it may only be feasible for an external attacker to get a few minutes to a few hours alone with a machine,” Hall told us, “having a machine that they can develop and pilot possible attacks would be a very necessary resource for this kind of work.”
He adds that, given the way electronic voting systems are currently designed and certified, even if it was discovered, before an election, that a hacker had developed a new way to exploit such systems, “no specific ‘fix’ or update could be developed and certified in time. We’d likely have to run the next election knowing a serious set of vulnerabilities were live in the system.”
The eBay sale of the ES&S touch-screens is not the first instance in which similar e-voting systems have become available for sale to the general public on eBay. Back in 2008, The BRAD BLOG also broke the news about the availability of Diebold Accuvote touch-screen systems for sale there as well. At the time, we wrote:
While covering the Diebold systems becoming available on eBay, we also described them as “the perfect gift for the careful, discriminating hacker”. Well, great news! With the iVotronic now available to anyone and everyone, your shopping options just got even better!
Happy hacking, hackers!
Jeezum Crow! Why do we even bother?
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Who cares! You’re making mountains out of molehills here. It’s not like someone can buy a tabulator, haul it into a polling station, and start going all willy-nilly on the voting results of an election. To do that, they’d need to connect to the network, and to do THAT means they’d have to get into a voting station with the hardware and do a bunch of jerry-rigging right there on election day. EVEN THEN, the votes that are cast would have some sort of code that corresponds to the device that captured the vote and so success would be contingent on bypassing and fooling a number of stopgaps and system checks to succeed. Maybe fodder for an Ocean’s 21 Movie in the future, but not so much now. Sorry, Charlie.
My sense is that a jurisdiction might buy it as a spare for a by-election. Or they might add it to their existing “fleet” that they would lease out to smaller communities. Or, they might just use the thing for training Deputies, testing ballots or other things – as a prop and nothing more. For it to actually be used in an election, the folks at ES&S have some kind of service level or whatever that warranties the devices and all that.
Oh, while we’re on the topic of fearmongering, let’s bring up the Y2K issue, too. Because there are still computers that have that, and it’s a very real threat – so I hear.
Carry on.
O/T but too amazing not to share here: it appears that there’s (at least) ONE relatively-sane Republican in Wisconsin!
Wisconsin Republican Legislator Tears Into His Own Party For Voter Suppression
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/03/19/3416499/wisconsin-senator-voter-suppression/
The pseudonymous (for some reason) Cheezeballs said @ 3:
Thanks for your thoughts, Cheeze. Unfortunately, it sounds like you either haven’t read up on the actual dangers of e-voting systems (and the ones accompanied by having one for your own, which will allow you to accomplish quite a lot) or you have a reason to throw a blizzard of smoke in hopes of disinforming folks here for some reason.
Unfortunately, I’ve got to get to the radio station right now to talk about this (and other things) on air, so I can’t respond point by point. But there’s plenty of info out there if you’d like to educate yourself for now.
If, on the other hand, you hope to disinform…well, in that case, no amount of actual science from scientists will persuade you to do otherwise, I suppose.
Brad,
Don’t forget those machines purchased by the Princeton professors for something like $30 each from the government website! Others were purchased that cheaply also in Tennessee!
As far as anyone knows, these DREs are no longer being manufactured new. Pretty much all existing DRE voting machines are now very old, possibly failing, and possibly even worn out. But as Brad said, there are a huge number of counties and states out there still invested in using these dinosaurs. Instead of moving to a more verifiable form of voting, some of these counties might be looking to replace iVotronic machines or expand capacity as their population grows. Plenty of these counties might be looking at a $500 used machine being sold on eBay as a bargain when contrasted with spending $2000, $2500, or whatever more for an official refurb (but still used) unit directly from ES&S.
The scary thing is, whether it’s a high priced refurb or an eBay bargain, the voters will still get a USED machine, meaning taxpayer dollars are being spent for an ancient computer that is probably at least eight or nine years old.
Sadly, Cheesballs apparently does not know enough about the ES&S system to know that “networks” are not exactly involved. Distinguished computer scientists have fully demonstrated attacks on iVotronic voting machines that could easily be done under the current methods of distribution and use. These attacks do not involve any network and some of these attacks use simple means and devices that are common and easy to obtain.
I am an elected local election official in Pennsylvania, in a jurisdiction where the county commissioners have chosen to use the ES&S iVotronic. As an election official I have to be constantly vigilant that one of these attacks is not occurring while voters are using the machines. I worry that someone could access and attack a unit while the machines are lying around our polling places after pre-election delivery or waiting for post-election pickup.
Security on electronic voting machines has always been a real problem (among many problems associated with this form of voting.) A DRE voting machine that falls into the wrong hands could be reverse engineered to create all kinds of mischief. And used, $500 eBay bargains are not going to improve the situation!
There are places where poll workers take machines home with them so they can set up polling places when the time comes. Nothing could go wrong with that, right?