A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 391

Software and voting machines are “validated” by state governments prior to ac-
quiring the equipment. However, problems still occur even after validation, which
shows that for voting machines, as with other kinds of software, testing has a fairly
low level of defect removal efficiency.
The few sample errors from history listed below illustrate that electronic voting
needs independent and objective quality analysis from neutral parties such as uni-
versities or bipartisan watchdog groups. The software itself should be subject to
analysis by experts and also to the use of tools such as static analysis tools that
might find errors that escaped the developers.
• In 1992 in Yamhill County, Oregon, computer votes for the district attor-
ney had to be reversed. The computer software assumed the candidates
were in alphabetical order, and it awarded the election to the wrong can-
didate.
• In 1993, published voting results in St. Petersburg, Florida, reported 1,492
votes cast in precinct 194, which had no registered voters for that election.
As it happens, the election was decided by 1,495 votes.
• The journal Governing (Governing.com) reported that in Broward County,
Florida, in 2004, voting machines by Electronic Systems and Software
had a maximum limit of 32,000 votes, after which the machines began to
count backward.
• In 2005, a hacker from Finland successfully penetrated voting machines in
Leon County, Florida, just to prove that it was easy to do. He apparently
did not try to modify results but only alerted officials to the fact that al-
most any hacker could do the same.
• In 2008, Ohio found that voting machines manufactured by Premier (re-
ported in the Washington Post and USA Today ) dropped votes when data
from memory cards were transferred to the central tally point. At first, the
problem was denied, then blamed on an antivirus package, and finally ac-
knowledged to be a software error. The same machines were used in 34
states and the error apparently had persisted for ten years. Larger precincts
were losing several hundred votes.
• In the 2010 elections, the Republican Party in North Carolina filed suit
against the State Election Commission, charging that when voters attemp-
ted to select the Republican Party, the direct recording electronic voting
machines overrode the choice and selected the Democratic Party.