Hursti Hack

The Hursti Hack was a successful attempt to alter the votes recorded on a Diebold optical scan voting machine. The hack is named after Harri Hursti.

The participants were:

In a series of four tests conducted in Feb., May, and Dec. 2005, Ion Sancho invited Black Box Voting to Tallahassee after an invitation to check the Diebold machines. Black Box Voting engaged the services of Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson and Harri Hursti. Dr. Thompson and Hursti believed they could change or hack vote totals without the system detecting entry. The first two projects targeted the computer program that adds up all the voting machine results and produces the final report. On Feb. 14 and again on May 2, Thompson successfully hacked the Diebold GEMS central tabulator and bypassed all passwords by using a Visual Basic script. This, however, would be detected in a vigilant environment if the supervisor of elections checks the poll tapes (voting machine results) against the central tabulator report.

For purposes of demonstration, an election was run using Leon High School as a model. The results of the first hack are shown below.

To show that both the results tapes and the central tabulator could be hacked, Black Box Voting then engaged the services of Hursti to hack the poll tapes. Black Box Voting purchased a card reader from the internet and Hursti used it to produce counterfeit memory cards, which successfully altered the voting machine results tapes on May 26, 2005.

A fourth trip to Tallahassee was made on Dec. 13, 2005. Black Box Voting and the producers of the film Hacking Democracy organized the test. Attending were Harris and Kathleen Wynne from Black Box Voting, Hursti, Thompson, along with Susan Pynchon of Florida Fair Elections Coalition from Volusia County, Florida, and Susan Bernecker, a former candidate for New Orleans city council who videotaped Sequoia-brand touch-screen voting machines in her district recording vote after vote for the wrong candidate. During his research, Hursti found that Diebold's cards allowed negative votes. Hursti successfully altered the votes using only a memory card, producing a one-step hack that simultaneously altered both the central tabulator results and the voting machine results tapes for matched (but rigged) results. "I would have had no way of knowing," said Sancho. "I would have certified this election."

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