The staff’s key statement is a mischaracterization of NYSTEC’s conclusion: they write, “NYSTEC believes that SLI security testing of the Dominion source code provided reasonable assurance that malicious code that could be triggered to enable the machine to print additional marks on an already marked ballot, is not present in the version tested.”
Misleadingsīased on the reports from SLI and NYSTEC, the operations staff (Thomas Connolly, Director of Operations) of the Board of Elections prepared a 3-page recommendation. Without the mitigations, NYSTEC rates the “Impact” of this Threat Scenario as “Very High”, and with the mitigations they rate the impact as “Low”. Then they explain why some of these physical mitigations “may not be feasible.” * Insert a foam block inside the printer carriage, as this will prevent the system from ever printing on an already voted ballot. * Remove the printer ink and only insert it when the system is being used in BMD mode. * Leave the printer access panel open as this will prevent an unauthorized ballot from being marked without detection. Their suggested physical mitigations are: NYSTEC suggests that the problem could be mitigated by physically preventing the hardware from printing votes onto any ballot except when the machine is deliberately being used in BMD mode (e.g., to accommodate a voter with a disability). SLI seems more confused: they say the source code they reviewed will not (ask the hardware to) mark additional votes onto a voted ballot. NYSTEC’s report (and not just this paragraph) agrees that (1) the hardware is physically capable of marking additional votes onto a voted ballot and (2) this is a very serious problem. Such a process is unlikely to be trusted by the public. This would not be the case with theīMD/scanner attack and if such an attack were to occur, then a forensic analysis would be needed on all ballots in question to determine if a human or machine made the mark. If the software/firmware was compromised to alter election results, on a regular scanner (without BMD capabilities) one still has the voted ballots to ensure the election can be properly decided.
What makes this type of attack different however is that the voted paper ballots from a compromised combination BMD/scanner machine could not be easily used to audit the scanner results because they have been compromised. NYSTEC, NYS State Board of Elections and computer science experts have long agreed that when an adversary has the ability to modify or replace the software/firmware that controls a voting machine then significant and damaging impacts to an election are possible. NYSTEC seems less naive: they summarized the issue under examination as follows: The Board of Elections then commissioned NYSTEC, a technology consulting company, to analyze SLI’s report. (SLI’s report is pages 7-9 of the combined document.) SLI’s new report dated Mais quite naive: they ran tests on the machine and “at no point was the machine observed making unauthorized additions to the ballots.” Well indeed, if you test a machine that hasn’t (yet) been hacked, it won’t misbehave. The Board of Elections commissioned an additional report from SLI Compliance, which had done the first certification of this machine back in April 2018. This would defeat the purpose of voter-verifiable paper ballots, which are meant to serve as a safeguard against buggy or fraudulent software.
#Imagecast machines software
The problem is, if the ICE’s software were hacked, the hacked software could make the machine print additional (fraudulent votes) onto hand-marked paper ballots. Most voters are expected to feed in a hand-marked optical scan ballot but the ICE also has an integrated ballot-marking device for use by those voters who wish to mark their ballot by machine. The Dominion ICE is an optical-scan voting machine. Two months ago I wrote that the New York State Board of Elections was going to request a reexamination of the Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine, in light of a design flaw that I had previously described.
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