Some researchers at Princeton University have shown that you can throw an entire election run on Diebold hardware, in such a way that it's undetectable after the fact, if you have physical access to only one machine for just one minute.
These are exactly the machines that Lori and I used to vote on. Unfortunately, this isn't the only way these machines can be hacked, Black Box Voting showed that these machines can also be accessed remotely to alter votes. So physical access isn't required.
The fact that these machines provide no paper receipt for your ballot is insane.
After watching the video one might be tempted to say, "Sure they can be hacked, but only by a super genius." Not true. You only need one genius guy to write the software. Then he can make a handy virus creator program that would allow anyone with even a little technical know-how to put a virus on a card that would throw the election whichever way they wanted. It's called a 'brown bag hack' and it's used all the time.
I went to college with Ed Felten. You probably also recognize him as the guy who un-installed IE without disabling Windows. His blog is at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ , in case you're interested.
Posted by: Donna at September 14, 2006 10:47 AMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
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