The Dangers of Electronic Voting Machines
Any computer can be hacked. And it has been done to voting machines. Several problems are inter-related.
First, some "electronic" machines are just scanners that record your paper ballot. Those are auditable against the paper ballot. However, on many machines, no such audit trail exists. You press a button or turn a dial. You have no idea what the computer records - if it records anything at all.
Second, computers can be compromised, as everyone knows. This has been done in public demonstrations with voting equipment.
From the pictures in a Diebold advertisement, hackers made their own keys to open one. That could have been done in 1950, but in 1950 no one was thinking like that. Today, many people are. Right now, the largest hacker conventions in the world is happening in Las Vegas and "locksporting" is a pass-time with them. (See http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2011/...)
University of Michigan professor of computer science, J. Alex Halderman makes a special study of voting machines. Before competing his doctorate, he earned his masters at Princeton inventing the "cold boot attack" where you pour liquid nitrogen on a CPU before unpowering it, in order to preserve the state of the memory.
Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System
Scott Wolchok, Eric Wustrow, Dawn Isabel, and J. Alex Halderman
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Security Analysis of India's Electronic Voting Machines
Scott Wolchok, Eric Wustrow, J. Alex Halderman, Hari K. Prasad, Arun Kankipati, Sai Krishna Sakhamuri, Vasavya Yagati, and Rop Gonggrijp
Proc. 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
CCS ’10, Chicago, IL, October 2010
Researchers load Pac-Man onto voting machine
Over the summer, computer science graduate student Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman GS ’09 reprogrammed a Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen voting machine to play the arcade classic Pac-Man in honor of the game’s 30th anniversary. The process took just three afternoons.
“The machine internally resembles something like a 15-year-old PC,” Feldman said. “It will run PC software if you can get it on there.”
[...]
“It would take a much smaller change to the software to reprogram it to steal votes,” Halderman said.
Run your own Internet searches on "problems with electronic voting machines" and "voting machine fraud" and so on.
First, some "electronic" machines are just scanners that record your paper ballot. Those are auditable against the paper ballot. However, on many machines, no such audit trail exists. You press a button or turn a dial. You have no idea what the computer records - if it records anything at all.
Second, computers can be compromised, as everyone knows. This has been done in public demonstrations with voting equipment.
From the pictures in a Diebold advertisement, hackers made their own keys to open one. That could have been done in 1950, but in 1950 no one was thinking like that. Today, many people are. Right now, the largest hacker conventions in the world is happening in Las Vegas and "locksporting" is a pass-time with them. (See http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2011/...)
University of Michigan professor of computer science, J. Alex Halderman makes a special study of voting machines. Before competing his doctorate, he earned his masters at Princeton inventing the "cold boot attack" where you pour liquid nitrogen on a CPU before unpowering it, in order to preserve the state of the memory.
Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System
Scott Wolchok, Eric Wustrow, Dawn Isabel, and J. Alex Halderman
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Security Analysis of India's Electronic Voting Machines
Scott Wolchok, Eric Wustrow, J. Alex Halderman, Hari K. Prasad, Arun Kankipati, Sai Krishna Sakhamuri, Vasavya Yagati, and Rop Gonggrijp
Proc. 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
CCS ’10, Chicago, IL, October 2010
Researchers load Pac-Man onto voting machine
Over the summer, computer science graduate student Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman GS ’09 reprogrammed a Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen voting machine to play the arcade classic Pac-Man in honor of the game’s 30th anniversary. The process took just three afternoons.
“The machine internally resembles something like a 15-year-old PC,” Feldman said. “It will run PC software if you can get it on there.”
[...]
“It would take a much smaller change to the software to reprogram it to steal votes,” Halderman said.
Run your own Internet searches on "problems with electronic voting machines" and "voting machine fraud" and so on.
http://conservativevideos.com/2012/11/pr.........
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2Lwnmbdi...
Nonetheless, if true, it does show that as demonstrations such as Alex Halderman's "Pac Man" and "Hail to the Victors" have warned, electronic voting machines are too vulnerable to be trusted in this process. Voting is fundamental to our political culture. Hardly a military dictatorship still exists that does not at least put on sham elections as symbols. In the so-called "democracies," this may indicate the total irrelevance of elections.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/washin...
Wikipedia has a long article, of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Vot...
Sequioa is over 100 years old and used to make lever-action voting booth. Sequoia is now owned by Dominion Voting Systems of Denver; and its ties with Smartmatic of Venezuela have been cut. Some of this came to light as a result of a lawsuit by Hart Intercivic of Austin, Texas.
"
The majority of electronic voting machines in use are manufactured by four companies: Premier Election Solutions (formerly known as Diebold Election Systems), Election Systems and Software (ES&S), Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems. While all electronic voting machines directly record and tabulate votes electronically, the way votes are cast differs between machines and models."
from "Voting Machines" on the Pro and Con website here:
http://votingmachines.procon.org/