How to steal votes and cover your tracks: why Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine is unsafe for democracy.
Assume you were the president of a company that made a lot of money selling the electronic voting machines used by 10% of U.S. voters. Assume also that a Princeton professor and two young grad students ran their own security analysis of your voting machines and determined the following:
- The physical lock of your voting machines can be picked in 10 seconds.
- Your voting machines can then easily be infected with a computer virus, since they are general-purpose computers running specialized election software.
- It only takes about one minute to infect one of your machines using a single memory card.
- The virus can easily be spread among numerous voting machines by innocent users updating the software with a memory card.
- Virus software can easily make all of the diagnostic and double-checking software in your machines illusory and meaningless, therefore dangerous.
- The infected machine can be made to spit out (electronically or on paper) any faked election result, regardless of the voting conducted on the machines.
- Your machine, which is already in use in some jurisdictions, thus has serious design flaws.
If you want to see a video showing how incredibly easy it is to infect a Diebold machine, click here. Warning: Don’t watch this video just before going to bed. You’ll be too angry and it will keep you up.
Since many states are relying on your machine for the integrity of upcoming elections, you (as president of Diebold) would doubtless write something like this to the three guys at …