Election Watcher Files Affidavit Saying He Saw Sequoia Employee Illegally Connect To E-Voting Tabulator

from the that-can't-be-good dept

lavi d points us to a report from Jim March, on the Tucson Free Unix Group email list, claiming that he witnessed potentially illegal activity in observing part of the Arizona mail-in vote scanning operation in Maricopa County. He summarizes the issue thusly:

Basically, we caught Maricopa County elections in a felony today - cross-wiring the central tabulator to a non-secure laptop owned by Sequoia Voting Systems, complete with cellular modem card in there and live. And I couldn't get a picture. Need a micro-cam of some sort to get the proof. See also my affidavit filed with our attorney today.

Remember: by law, the central tabulator system on what's supposed to be an isolated local network is completely unpatched - it's not allowed to be modified in any way since the day it shipped in 2006 or 2007. Even if the Sequoia tech didn't cross-connect the cellmodem to the Ethernet (and both appeared to be live), he could have easily "pwned" the "secure" systems with any number of ancient script-kiddy exploits.

He then includes the affidavit he filed. Basically, he spotted a Sequoia employee hooked into the central tabulator, via an ethernet cable from his own laptop, and he saw that the laptop had an EVDO card from Sprint -- and that, apparently, is a big no-no, as explained. When he asked to take a photograph of this, he was denied and was told that he was being disruptive. Now, there's no suggestion here that anything nefarious was going on, but that this central machine, which is supposed to be kept away from the internet, was exposed in a way that it should not have been. At the very least, this raises serious questions about the security of those machines.

Filed Under: arizona, e-voting, elections, jim march, maricopa county
Companies: sequoia