How Can Someone Tamper With An Electronic Voting Machine

The November 2006 elections that decided the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and local governments faced more uncertainty than any election up to now. As an alternative of "Democrat or Republican," the extra urgent ques­tion grew to become "correct depend or complete debacle?" Greater than 60 million Americans solid their votes on electronic voting machines for the first time in 2006. Some feared human and machine error, each of which have occurred in nearly all electronic voting since the machines were introduced in limited scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it is not simply conspiracy theorists: For the previous three or four years, laptop scientists have been tampering with voting machines to prove it can be accomplished. And they say it is really fairly easy. With electronic voting, all the setup is digital, not simply the actual casting of the vote. The voter is given a "good card" -- mainly a credit-card-kind system with a microchip in it -- that activates the electronic voting machine.



The voter casts his or her vote by touching a reputation on the screen. If the mannequin consists of printout capabilities (which is required by greater than half of U.S. If the printout is correct, the voter inserts it into voting machine before leaving the sales space to complete the voting course of. In non-print-out models, the voter leaves the booth after solid his or her vote on the touchscreen. Once the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor's good card into the voting machine and enters a password to access the tally of all votes on that machine. Election officials both transmit the tallies electronically, by way of a network connection, to a central location for the county, or else carry the memory card by hand to the central location. ­Election officials point out that there are many safeguards in place to ensure nobody tampers with the voting machines -- that is an election we're talking about, in spite of everything.



A few of those safeguards embody tamper-resistant tape over the machine's memory card slot, a lock over the memory card slot and the machine's battery, and the means of evaluating the full votes on the memory card to the variety of voters at polling place and to a voting record stored on the machine's laborious disk (and to physical printouts if out there). Machines are password protected and require special entry playing cards for anybody to get to the memory card, and most polling places conduct background checks of election workers. Finally, the software program on these machines mechanically encrypts each vote that is cast. So, where does the problem come in? Experts point out a lot of areas that want enchancment, but as you can most likely tell from the record of safeguards above, the memory card is considered to be the weakest point in the system. Princeton University computer-science professor memory improvement solution Edward Felton and a few his graduate students acquired themselves one in every of the most common voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and had their approach with it.



They picked the lock blocking entry to the memory improvement solution card and changed it with a memory card they'd contaminated with a virus. The virus altered the votes cast on the machine in a approach that can be undetectable to election officials, as a result of the vote numbers were not solely changed on the memory card, but additionally in all of the backup logs on the machine's arduous disk. So the ultimate numbers matched up just advantageous. One other report, this one by a computer science professor who can be an election volunteer, states that the security tape protected the memory card slot seems nearly exactly the same after somebody removes it and then replaces it -- you've got to hold the machine at a certain angle in the sunshine to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Different experts concentrate on the software that data each vote. It is too easy, they are saying, and not encrypted properly enough.