Smartmatic "Glitch" in Philippines election May 13, 2013.
https://youtu.be/QvrrXdXOGHo?list=ULirR0k4g_YuI
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36013713
"Personal information, including fingerprint data and passport information, belonging to around 70 million people is said to have been compromised by hackers.
The Philippine Commission on the Elections (Comelec) saw its website defaced at the end of March.
The Anonymous Philippines group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
The group said it sought to highlight "vulnerabilities" in the system, including the use of automated voting machines that will be used on 9 May.
A second hacker group called LulzSec Philippines is believed to have posted Comelec's entire database online several days later.
Comelec claims that no sensitive information was released, according to multiple reports.
However, cybersecurity firm Trend Micro believes the incident is the biggest government-related data breach in history and that authorities are downplaying the problem.
"Every registered voter in the Philippines is now susceptible to fraud and other risks," it said in a report."
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/fears-of-automated-voting-glitches-cast-doubt-on-philippine-elections/
"But less than a week before elections, more than 76,000 faulty memory chips from the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines were recalled by Smartmatic-TIM, the multinational company contracted to produce the voting machines, causing panic that the automated system will not be ready by election day."
Most electronic voting isn't secure, CIA expert says
MARCH 24, 2009
"The CIA got interested in electronic systems a few years ago, Stigall said, after concluding that foreigners might try to hack U.S. election systems. He said he couldn't elaborate "in an open, unclassified forum," but that any concerns would be relayed to U.S. election officials.
Stigall, who's studied electronic systems in about three dozen countries, said that most countries' machines produced paper receipts that voters then dropped into boxes. However, even that doesn't prevent corruption, he said.
Turning to Venezuela, he said that Chavez controlled all of the country's voting equipment before he won a 2004 nationwide recall vote that had threatened to end his rule.
When Chavez won, Venezuelan mathematicians challenged results that showed him to be consistently strong in parts of the country where he had weak support. The mathematicians found "a very subtle algorithm" that appeared to adjust the vote in Chavez's favor, Stigall said.
Calls for a recount left Chavez facing a dilemma, because the voting machines produced paper ballots, Stigall said.
"How do you defeat the paper ballots the machines spit out?" Stigall asked. "Those numbers must agree, must they not, with the electronic voting-machine count? . . . In this case, he simply took a gamble."
Stigall said that Chavez agreed to allow 100 of 19,000 voting machines to be audited.
"It is my understanding that the computer software program that generated the random number list of voting machines that were being randomly audited, that program was provided by Chavez," Stigall said. "That's my understanding. It generated a list of computers that could be audited, and they audited those computers.
"You know. No pattern of fraud there."
A Venezuelan Embassy representative in Washington declined immediate comment.
The disclosure of Stigall's remarks comes amid recent hostile rhetoric between President Barack Obama and Chavez. On Sunday, Chavez was quoted as reacting hotly to Obama's assertion that he's been "exporting terrorism," referring to the new U.S. president as a "poor ignorant person."
Questions about Venezuela's voting equipment caused a stir in the United States long before Obama became president, because Smartmatic, a voting machine company that partnered with a firm hired by Chavez's government, owned U.S.-based Sequoia Voting Systems until 2007. Sequoia machines were in use in 16 states and the District of Columbia at the time.
Reacting to complaints that the arrangement was a national security concern, the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States launched an investigation. Smartmatic then announced in November 2007 that it had sold Sequoia to a group of investors led by Sequoia's U.S.-based management team, thus ending the inquiry.
In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Stigall said, hackers took resurrecting the dead to "a new art form" by adding the names of people who'd died in the 18th century to computerized voter-registration lists. Macedonia was accused of "voter genocide" because the names of so many Albanians living in the country were eradicated from the computerized lists, Stigall said…"
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol.-56-no.-3/a-strategy-framework-for-the-intelligence-analyst.html
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article24530650.html
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2009-03-25-0903240422-story.html
…
He said that elections also could be manipulated when votes were cast, when ballots were moved or transmitted to central collection points, when official results were tabulated and when the totals were posted on the Internet.
In Ukraine, Stigall said, opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko lost a 2004 presidential election runoff because supporters of Russian-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych "introduced an unauthorized computer into the Ukraine election committee national headquarters. They snuck it in.
"The implication is that these people were . . . making subtle adjustments to the vote. In other words, intercepting the votes before it goes to the official computer for tabulation."
Taped cell-phone calls of the ensuing cover-up led to nationwide protests and a second runoff, which Yushchenko won.
Election Assistance Commission officials didn't trumpet Stigall's appearance Feb. 27, and he began by saying that he didn't wish to be identified. However, the election agency had posted his name and biography on its Web site before his appearance.
Electronic voting systems have been controversial in advanced countries, too. Germany's constitutional court banned computerized machines this month on the grounds that they don't allow voters to check their choices.
Stigall said that some countries had taken novel steps that improved security.
For example, he said, Internet systems that encrypt vote results so they're unrecognizable during transmission "greatly complicates malicious corruption." Switzerland, he noted, has had success in securing Internet voting by mailing every registered citizen scratch cards that contain unique identification numbers for signing on to the Internet. Then the voters must answer personal security questions, such as naming their mothers' birthplaces.
Stigall commended Russia for transmitting vote totals over classified communication lines and inviting hackers to test its electronic voting system for vulnerabilities. He said that Russia now hoped to enable its citizens to vote via cell phones by next year.
"As Russia moves to a one-party state," he said, "they're trying to make their elections available . . . so everyone can vote for the one party. That's the irony."
After reviewing Stigall's remarks, Susannah Goodman, the director of election reform for the citizens' lobby Common Cause, said they showed that "we can no longer ignore the fact that all of these risks are present right here at home . . . and must secure our election system by requiring every voter to have his or her vote recorded on a paper ballot.""
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2159260/software-bug-disrupts-evote-count-in-belgian-election.html
The problematic voting machines are one of two kinds in use in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Since 2012, other parts of Flanders have been voting on a Linux-based e-voting system made by Venezuelan company Smartmatic. In Wallonia, the French-speaking part of the country, about 80 percent of the municipalities vote using paper and pencil.
Voters that use the old system receive a magnetic stripe card that they feed into the computer before using a light pen to select candidates from a list shown on a CRT (cathode ray-tube) screen. The vote is than loaded onto the magnet stripe card, which the voter places into an “electronic urn” that reads the stripe and sends the result to the main computer in the polling station.
After the elections are over the results are loaded on a 3.5-inch floppy disk and shipped to the canton headquarters where the disks are fed into another computer that adds up the votes before sending the results to the ministry. It was there that the problem occurred, the spokesman said, adding that the votes that ended up on the disks were correct.
Kommer Kleijn, spokesman for VoorEVA.be, a Belgian organization that rejects the e-voting system because “it deprives voters from effectively verifying the elections in which they partake” called the problems “a catastrophe.”
“They claim that the recording of the votes was done flawlessly, but who can verify that? We can’t,” Kleijn said.
There is no way to prove that the bug was only present in the application used to add up the votes and not in other parts of the voting system, he said.
And even though the source code of the software is published after the elections there is no way to verify the code beforehand, he said. Therefore VoorEVA concludes that the results of the elections in these municipalities cannot be valid and need to be redone Kleijn said.
It is not the first time voting with this system went awry, said Kleijn. “Every time this system was used there was a fault comparable to this one,” Kleijn said.
In 2003 in the town of Schaarbeek for instance voting machines counted 4,096 more votes more than there were registered voters, according to a study conducted by seven Belgian universities. And in Liège in 2006, some candidates had a higher intermediate result than their end result, said Kleijn.
While the problems are ongoing, there have been fewer problems with e-voting systems this year than in 2012, said Grouwels. On Sunday there were about 600 technical interventions needed, about one-third fewer than in 2012, he said.
Most of the interventions were small, for instance problems with card readers, printers and malfunctioning displays, according to Grouwels.
Belgium is one of the last European countries to still use e-voting systems. In Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court banned the use of electronic voting machines in 2009 because results from the machines were not verifiable. The Netherlands banned the practice in 2008 after a group of activists successfully demonstrated that both types of electronic voting machines then in use could be tampered with…