Laptop, USB drives stolen from Philly election-staging site

PHILADELPHIA — Computer thumb drives used to program Philadelphia voting machines were stolen from a city warehouse along with the laptop of an employee from the machines’ manuf acturer.

The items were stolen from a warehouse in the city’s East Falls section, city election commission spokesman Nick Custodio said in a brief emailed statement, adding: “We are confident that this incident will not in any way compromise the integrity of the election.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, which first reported the theft in the majority Democratic city, said they were stolen this week.

The laptop did not hold any “sensitive election-related data” and was not used for election programming, said spokeswoman Katina Granger, of Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska, the manuf acturer. She said ES&S immediately cut it off from the vendor ’s network upon learning of the theft.

Granger said she was not able to address specifics about the stolen USB drives, including how many were taken and what was on them. Custodio did not answer emailed questions, including whether any of the 3,750 ExpressVote XL touchscreen ballot-marking devices used by the city might have been affected.

Pennsylvania is a crucial battleground which Trump won by 44,000 votes in 2016, with Hillary Clinton winning Philadelphia by a 67% margin, or 475,000 votes.

Election security expert Eddie Perez of the nonpartisan OSET Institute said Philadelphia voters’ confidence in the integrity of the election demands on transparency from officials that is so f ar lacking: “This is supposed to be a secured f acility,“he said, “and apparently neither the county nor the election vendor adequately protected these sensitive assets. Why not?”

Granger of ES&S said the companies’ USB devices use multiple levels of encryption and are “married” to single voting machines during programming. But Perez said that it’s so f ar unclear how f ar along Philadelphia was in programming for the Nov. 3 election — and thus how much of a threat the theft might pose.

“It is very, very common that a USB stick has a wealth of information that is related not only to the configuration of the election and its ballot — and the behavior of the voting device — but also internal system data used to validate the election,“said Perez.

“In principle, someone possessing the information on one of these USBs could disrupt the opening and closing of the devices in polling places. They could disrupt how ballots are displayed on the screen and they could potentially disrupt counting votes on those ballots.”