The Web site for a company whose e-voting machines have come under fire from
election officials in New Jersey was hacked Thursday morning, according to an
computer scientist who was asked to investigate voting-machine discrepancies
in the state's primary election.
The "Ballot
Blog" portion of the Sequoia Voting Systems Web site had no content
early Thursday afternoon Eastern Standard Time (EST), and earlier in the day
there were messages on the page that it had been hacked, Princeton computer
science professor Edward Felten told the IDG News Service in an e-mail Thursday.
Felten, a critic of e-voting systems, had been asked by a group representing
New Jersey county clerks to examine Sequoia machines used in a Feb. 5 New Jersey
presidential primary election.
In his e-mail, Felten said that around 6:30 a.m. EST, the Ballot Blog, in which
Sequoia gave an in-depth explanation of what had gone wrong in New Jersey, had
been replaced with a message saying it had been hacked. He said the message
named those who were responsible for the hack, but he could not remember what
that name was other than "it was a mixture of lower-case letters and numbers."
By mid-morning, the site had been taken offline by its Web-hosting provider
and redirected to a hosting-provider
page that said the page had been suspended temporarily for maintenance.
"My guess is that the took the site down temporarily while they were clearing
out the stuff left behind by the intruder," Felten said.
Eventually, the blog page returned to its normal appearance Thursday afternoon,
but there was still no blog content on the site. Sequoia did not respond immediately
to requests for comment.
Sequoia has come under scrutiny for discrepancies in the voting tallies generated
by approximately 60 of the state's Sequoia Voting Systems AVC Advantage e-voting
machines during last month's election. On Wednesday, a group representing clerks
from a half-dozen New Jersey counties wrote to State Attorney General Anne Milgram
asking her to investigate the problems.
In most cases, the discrepancy involved a one- or two-vote difference between
the paper tape logged by the machine and the number of votes stored in the machine's
memory cartridges. Sequoia blamed the discrepancy on poll worker error and said
the problem could be fixed with a software update, but state clerks requested
a third-party investigation.
Last Tuesday, the clerks group asked Felten to examine the Sequoia machines.
However, Sequoia threatened legal action against Felten, saying that such a
review would violate the company's licensing agreement, so he did not carry
out his investigation.
(Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this article.)
