RTFA: http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.ph…

Texas: Voting System Allows “Corrections”
by Warren Stewart, Senior Project Director, Verified Voting Foundation
November 20th, 2007

A Houston Chronicle article last week described how, following the November 6 election, Harris County election administrator Johnnie German “used high-security codes to tap into the Harris County elections computer system last week and change some of the results manually.” It seems that the Hart Intercivic voting system used in Harris County allows anyone with access and a passcode to modify vote totals from an election without leaving any record of the modification.

But it gets worse. According to Dan Wallach of Rice University’s Computer Security Lab, who served on the task force that recently studied the Hart system as part of the California Secretary of State’s electronic voting system review , the “encryption key” code can be extracted from voting equipment at any precinct.

The necessity for modifying the vote totals in Harris County was the result of confusion during early voting caused by split precincts resulted in 293 voters in Emergency Services District No. 9 being given the wrong ballot and therefore being unable to express an opinion on a sales tax referendum for a fire/ambulance district in the Cypress-Fairbanks area of the county since it didn’t appear on their screens.

Computer expert John R. Behrman, who observed the vote adjustments, said he was “shocked” when he saw German use a series of passwords and an “encryption key” — a series of numbers on a nail file-size computer memory storage device — to reach a computer program that said “Adjustment.” Shocking indeed.

“A hundred percent of precincts reporting, and everything had been distributed to the press,” he said. “Then and only then did I see how they were going to do this, and frankly I never thought it was possible.

“Basically it turns out, without regard to any ballots that have been cast, you can enter arbitrary numbers in there and report them out in such a way that, unless you go back to these giant (computer) logs and interpret the logs, you wouldn’t know it has been done.”

Bye Bye Democracy, we’ll miss you!