Mangesh Hattikudur
How to steal an election
by Mangesh Hattikudur - September 20, 2006 - 12:05 PM

MIT’s Tech Review has a curious article today about the efficacy of voting machines. According to the article, Princeton University researchers have shown 3 fairly alarming things in terms of the Diebold AccuVote-TS:

  1. They’ve shown that you can hack into the system and it’s memory card in under a minute and deliberately rig an election with less than $12 in tools.
  2. They’ve also found out that you can rather easily insert a malicious virus into the machines that will affect the voting, and “disappear” without a trace, leaving no evidence of tampering.
  3. They’ve found that once the virus code is inserted into a machine, it can be spread to other machines. Because the memory cards are reused, the virus can be programmed to linger on the card and continue to steal votes on any machine in which the card has been inserted. The Princeton professor likens it to “the old days, when viruses were spread on floppy disks.”

What’s most terrifying, however, is that if done far enough in advance, a single hacker could steal a significant number of votes in an important election by simply infecting one machine. For more at the Tech Review, click here.

« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Click here to get a Risk-Free issue of mental_floss magazine
Comments (5)

  1. All of that is because Diebold is lazy about security. If they were to adopt measures taken by the gambling industry none of this would be possible. Slot machines are all computers these days and multiple levels of security ensure that no one could do any of the shenanigans above. Even if you could physically break into the box (unlikely), the software could not be changed.

    I guess we care more about our money than our votes.

    posted by n2y2 on 9-20-2006 at 1:15 pm

  2. that’s a clever point… Diebold does seem lazy from what I’ve read.

    posted by Mangesh on 9-20-2006 at 1:22 pm

  3. I’m deeply concerned that the mainstream media and the general public aren’t . . . well, deeply concerned about this. A revelation like this one ought to cause–if not rioting in the streets–at least major league indignation from every quarter. Where’s the outrage?

    posted by Matt on 9-20-2006 at 2:02 pm

  4. I read a story about this yesterday where a Diebold manager said that the “IT” team had used an older model voting machine…and that the newer ones had better software. The Diebold guy also was surprised that the “hackers” had not shared their study with their peers before publishing it.

    There’s probably someone somewhere who works for Diebold who left a back door for someone to hack the newer machines…if there -are- newer machines.

    posted by stephen on 9-20-2006 at 6:19 pm

  5. Frankly, voter fraud has always existed. This is just a new method, not a new problem.

    Because of the technical expertise required to pull off this ruse, it may exclude some of the old methods of fraud (Ballot stuffing).

    Plus, as bad as these machines are, you must still be physically on-site to perform the tampering. That means that no hackers from China are going to be remotely changing the election.

    Here in Nevada, we have what is considered the most secure voting system in use. That is directly due to the states relationship with electronic gambling. The system is not absolutely bullet proof, but what makes a huge difference is a physical paper trail. Even if someone alters the electronic data, there is no way to change the paper the prints with each ballot casts.

    http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/10/28/nevada.evote/index.html

    Bottom line: electronic voting systems probably don’t have worse security than the mechanical/paper ballots that are being replaced.

    posted by n2y2 on 9-20-2006 at 6:26 pm

Comment

commenting policy