Hursti Hack - Hursti Memory Card Hacks

Hursti Memory Card Hacks

The tests by Hursti were the third (May 26, 2005) and fourth (Dec. 13, 2005) in a series of five voting machine examinations produced by the Black Box Voting group. The first four tests were authorized by Supervisor of Elections for Leon County, Ion Sancho to ascertain whether votes could be altered on a Diebold voting machine. Tests on Feb. 14, 2005 and May 2, 2005 were conducted on the Diebold GEMS central tabulator by Herbert Hugh Thompson, who proved that results reports could be altered without a password by using a Visual Basic script. The third and fourth tests were memory card tests performed by Hursti. The fifth test took place with both Hursti and Thompson in Emery County Utah.

During Hursti's first memory card hack on May 26, 2005, he altered the program that creates the "poll tapes", or voting machine results reports. However, this hack would be detected if the supervisor of elections compared the poll tape results with the GEMS central tally report. The GEMS tally report can be hacked to match, as demonstrated during two earlier Black Box Voting projects in Leon County with Herbert Thompson. Thompson successfully manipulated the GEMS tally program using a Visual Basic script.

The May 26 version of the Hursti memory card hack would require two steps to succeed without detection in a vigilant election setting: Both the memory card and the GEMS tabulator program would need to have matching hacks.

During a videotaped meeting in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, DES Research and Development chief Pat Green stated that checks and balances would detect the tampering and that it would not be possible to alter the votes themselves on the memory card.

However, during the Dec. 13 2005 testing, Hursti successfully altered the votes on the memory card. His memory card manipulations falsified both the voting machine results tapes and the GEMS central tabulator report. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho stated that he would have had no way to detect the tampering and would have certified the election.

The Hursti memory card hack performed in Leon County on Dec. 13, 2005 is a variation on stuffing the ballot box prior to any votes being cast. Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card giving one candidate 5 positive votes and one candidate 5 negative votes to create a "zero report." This keeps the machine accurate in votes cast compared to number of voters.

"What we are going to do here is modify one card and then bring it to the election provider's Ion Sancho's office, log it has the real card...if in any election as to the real election system and run ballots through and that's the same system which have been used in a number of previous elections...and we'll see that what is the power in the ballot box, this should be an empty box containing the votes but it has more capabilities than that."

— Harri Hursti, Tuesday, December 13, 2005.

Actual paper ballots were used pre-printed with the following question: "Can the votes on this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?"