How to steal an election

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.