Chicago Voting Hack Test

Pay no heed to warnings that electronic voting is safe.

As if there weren't enough concerns about the integrity of the vote, a non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter database for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago.

Bob Wilson, an official with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project — which bills itself as a not-for-profit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficiencies — tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, including their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth.

Wilson said that a hacker could cause identity theft, wipe out the database, and change the precincts voter were suppose to go to. Which would have made their votes of all Chicago residents illegal. Tom Leach said the Sequoia voting machines are not part of the problem and that Social Security information is being removed to avoid identity theft.

"This is a part of the entire electronic voting program that we're depending on — computerized voter databases and electronic voting machines," Wilson said. "Any computer is subject to failure and security flaws and we have seen in electronic voting hundreds of news reports about dozens and dozens of jurisdictions where there are problems."