Christ. At least the Times and ABC picked this up, for once. Sid said yesterday, when asked by a particularly long winded activist on the topic, paper is the only way. Let's all come to our senses and admit that we need real reform, yesterday. If the elections don't come out the way all the polls are saying they will, no one can claim they weren't warned:

Another stunning security breach has been exposed in our nation's electoral system, The BRAD BLOG has learned, as the online voter registration database — containing the personal information of some 1.5 million voters in Chicago — has been found to be vulnerable to both downloading and hacking.

The flawed electronic database which allowed the retrieval and modification of personal voter information — including social security numbers and birthdates of Chicago voters — was discovered recently by members of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project (IBIP), a non-partisan group of Election Integrity advocates.

IBIP members say they were not only able to get full editing access to the online database, they also found they could modify the records for registered voters, setting them to inactive and otherwise changing addresses and other key information fields.

The ability to gain access and hack the system, said by IBIP to be covered on the front page of tomorrow's Chicago Sun-Times, was documented by the group on video-tape.

An exclusive version of that video-taped hack has been made available to The BRAD BLOG.
Cook County elections officials are said to be scrambling to plug the hole in what has become an ever-increasingly unsecured system of voting in America in light of new regulations, encouraging the use of electronic voting systems, and state-wide registration databases, as set forth by Congress's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after the 2000 Election Debacle.

In a news release sent to The BRAD BLOG earlier today (complete release posted at the end of this article), Bob Wilson, the Cook County chair of IBIP, says that the vulnerability would allow a malicous hacker to change voter registration status for thousands of Chicago voters.

"For example, you could change the status of all the voters in a precinct to inactive after the registration deadline so that when one of those voters checked their online status they might believe they were ineligible and wouldn't attempt to vote," Wilson says.

"Or, you could change their polling place information," he added, "so they would show up at the wrong precinct on election day . . . the possibilities are nearly endless and could cause election day havoc."

The problem was discovered by IBIP weeks ago, and the group immediately notified the appropriate authorities. "We had hoped that the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners would take quick action to plug this hole, but apparently that's not the case," IBIP member Peter Zelchenko is quoted as saying.

He estimates it would have taken little more than five minutes to fix the problem originally, but late last week IBIP and Zelchenko became aware that the security breach was significantly more severe than first thought. The Board was immediately notified again and finally began taking action over the weekend to install a new web interface for the system.

This is one of dozens, scores of problems that I've read about this year alone, and what happens when you mix computers, voting records, and country employees who don't understand technology. Toss in unscrupulous software and hardware vendors, and voila! Totally fucked voting. Yes, there are ways to mess with a paper-only voting system, but at least there is a paper trail to go with the crime. Crime in the ether is something that our local and state officials are the very last people to know how to track, prevent and otherwise uncover. It's long past time to stop expecting them to be able to do so.