Hack Hack

Fred Grimm reports in the Miami Herald that the man charged with certifying Florida's voting machines is unqualified for the job...at least according to the Secretary of State.

For a county supervisor of elections needing someone to test the vulnerabilities of his voting system, Dan Wallach's the man.

Wallach, who runs the security computer lab at Rice University, is a nationally regarded expert on computer network security and voting system vulnerabilities. He's associate director of ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). Besides, his parents live in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.

He is a perfect choice. But not in Florida.

Wallach and his associates at ACCURATE may represent academia's leading experts on voting system security, but under the new rules promulgated by the Florida Secretary of State, they don't qualify.

Any security test, the secretary of state's office insists, must be performed by someone certified by the American Software Testing Qualifications Board, the American Society for Quality or the EC (E-Commerce) Council.

Not only is Wallach not certified by the three organizations, "I've never heard of them," he says.

Actually, the first two organizations are concerned with the overall quality of manufactured software, not security. The EC Council website offers a five-day training course into something called "ethical hacking." Five days of training, under the new rules, would trump the most sophisticated résumés in computer science.

[...]

Of course, the new rules aren't really about protecting the integrity of elections. Only one Florida supervisor of elections allowed outside experts to test his voting system security. And when Ion Sancho's hackers discovered they could alter the outcome of an election and wipe out all trace of the tampering last year, it was a huge embarrassment to the Secretary of State's office. Instead of trying to fix the flaws, state officials and Diebold -- a maker of voting machines -- went after Sancho, disparaging his findings and suggested that he ought to be tossed from office.

Then California -- not Florida -- directed a panel of computer science experts to look into the Leon County findings. The panel found the same flaws and more. Florida election bureaucrats were humiliated.

"The new rules are designed to make sure that they're never embarrassed again," Sancho said Monday.

Florida first priority is to protect the vendors. We'll let California worry about the damn voters.

How do you expect to fix the election system in Florida if the fix is already in?