Crack-a-Vote Demo Ready for Hearing on SB-500

The House Government Affairs sub-committee on Elections, chaired by Hinesville Representative Buddy DeLoach has called for a hearing on SB-500, a bill to require a paper audit trail for Georgia's elections. Election reform activists with the Voter Choice Coalition, CounttheVote.org, the League Opposed to Virtual Elections and others are prepared to demonstrate how simple it is to crack Georgia's election machinery, manipulate votes and purge the electronic audit logs to leave no trace of the intrusion.

"The legitimacy of Georgia elections is threatened by the vulnerabilities introduced when Secretary of State Cathy Cox spent $54 million of tax-payer money to privatize Georgia's election tabulation," said Hugh Esco, chair of the Voter Choice Coalition (www.voterchoice.org) and former Green Party candidate for public office. "Now the Democrats have the opportunity to demonstrate whether their loyalties lie with the people of Georgia or with their 2006 Gubernatorial candidate. Given their performance in the Senate, we face an uphill battle in the Democrat controlled House."

Relying on early versions of the Diebold election tabulation software downloaded last year from an open FTP site operated by Diebold and Global Election Management, Inc., Coalition activist and computer programmer Roxanne Jekot examined their source code line-for-line and learned of the software's vulnerabilities. At today's demonstration she is prepared to show how easy it is to break in, escalate privileges, manipulate data and cover one's tracks. Last year she had offered to do such a demonstration only to be denied access to one of the Diebold machines although the Secretary of State's office had publicly welcomed the challenge in media statements.

Today will be the 39th Day of a forty day legislative session. If SB-500 is not today placed on the General Election calendar, it will be dead for the year. The Elections sub-committee of House Government Affairs is scheduled to meet today at 10:00 am in Room 216 of the State Capitol.

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For background, please link to:

http://www.voterchoice.org/
http://www.countthevote.org/

For further information, please contact:
Hugh Esco hesco@greens.org
Roxanne Jekot thejekots@yahoo.com

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