Fergie's Tech Blog

Ohio Seizes Electronic Voting Machines in Criminal Investigation

Ryan Paul writes on ARS Technica:

At the request of election officials, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has seized voting machines for forensic analysis and has launched a criminal investigation into the Franklin County Board of Elections.

The investigation was launched after Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's Secretary of State and chief election official, found that a candidate's name was marked as withdrawn on the electronic voting machine that she used during the recent primaries, an irregularity that was also reported by voters in other precincts. The state attorney general is now working with a team of computer forensic consultants to determine if there was any tampering.

Preliminary analysis conducted by specialists from SysTest Labs indicates that the internal audit capability of the Franklin County voting machines had been manually disabled by county election board programmers last year, making it almost impossible to tell if any nefarious changes have been made to the systems. SysTest also discovered that the election board had failed to adhere to routine machine testing standards and had tested only one machine in each precinct rather than all of the machines.

posted by Fergie @ 3/18/2008 11:48:00 AM