Palm Beach Florida and Cell-Phone Modems
Election Integrity in Palm Beach County, Florida
In the past, Palm Beach, Florida, has been the subject of Election Integrity complaints and scrutiny. Although recent elections have turned Florida into a Red state, Election Integrity remains a serious issue of concern.
Recognizing the pivotal role of the voter in the election process, the Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections has created a Website. This platform not only details the election process and identifies potential problem areas but also aims to educate and raise awareness among the voters, empowering them to play an active role in ensuring election integrity.
While the Website is a significant stride towards preserving Election Integrity, it's imperative to realize that it's not a panacea. There's a pressing need for comprehensive measures to guarantee the integrity of our elections.
Florida continues to use the ES&S Voting machine hardware and software in the election process because ES&S devices facilitate the rapid counting of votes using the built-in cell phone modem to transfer the accumulated votes to the central office.
The use of the cell phone modem in the ES&S voting machines exposes the transfer to potential manipulation and fraud. It's noteworthy that ES&S is the sole manufacturer with the built-in cell phone modem in its voting machines, raising concerns about the security of our elections.
The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine
An optical-scan machine in Oklahoma City during the 2016 presidential primary.Credit...Brett Deering/Getty Images
By Kim Zetter
Feb. 21, 2018
In 2011, the election board in Pennsylvania’s Venango County — a largely rural county in the northwest part of the state — asked David A. Eckhardt, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to examine its voting systems. In municipal and state primaries that year, a few voters had reported problems with machines ‘‘flipping’’ votes; that is, when these voters touched the screen to choose a candidate, the screen showed a different candidate selected.
Errors like this are especially troubling in counties like Venango, which uses touch-screen voting machines that have no backup paper trail; once a voter casts a digital ballot, if the machine misrecords the vote because of error or maliciousness, there’s little chance the mistake will be detected.
Eckhardt and his colleagues concluded that the problem with the machines, made by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), was likely a simple calibration error. But the experts were alarmed by something else they discovered. Examining the election-management computer at the county’s office — the machine used to tally official election results and, in many counties, to program voting machines — they found that remote-access software had been installed on it.
Remote-access software is a type of program that system administrators use to access and control computers remotely over the internet or over an organization’s internal network.
Election systems are supposed to be air-gapped — disconnected from the internet and from other machines that might be connected to the internet. The presence of the software suggested this wasn’t the case with the Venango machine, which made the system vulnerable to hackers.
Anyone who gains remote access to the system can use the software to take control of the machine. Logs showed the software was installed two years earlier and used multiple times, most notably for 80 minutes on November 1, 2010, the night before a federal election.
The software, it turns out, was being used not by a hacker but by an authorized county contractor working from home. Still, the arrangement meant anyone who might gain control of the contractor’s home computer could use it to access and gain control of the county’s election system.
It was just another example of something that Eckhardt and other experts had suspected for many years: that many critical election systems in the United States are poorly secured and protected against malicious attacks.
Palm Beach Florida and Cell-Phone Modems
Comments