Hotel minibar key opens Diebold voting machine!!!!

Freedom-to-Tinker ^ | Monday September 18, 2006 | Ed Felten

[Ditter]

Paper ballots can be over voted by a election worker and then thrown out. The only solution is honest election judges and honest poll watchers "from our side". I plan to volunteer to be a poll watcher in the Nov. election.

[DBrow]

Sounds like it is easier to swap a carton of paper ballots than it is to have a geek pick a lock, swap a card, override the encryption by knowing what sector to change and what to change it to (keeping the CRC, tally, and parity check the same for each machine) and leave the system with no sign of tampering. This would have to be done to a number of machines and coordinated at a high level.

The article deliberately makes it seem easy to do in theory.

As for problems, sure, as long as the wrong party wins there will be howls of protest and people marching in the street burning things and lawyers plotting per diem rates. Good thing Mexico avoided that by using paper ballots! Or ask the runner-up in the Washington governor's race about paper ballots, or perhaps look at the Milwaukee primary results.

[DBrow]

Hee hee, I didn't notice that. The guy looks at the key, maybe takes notes, then shows up with an identical key many hours later. Well that's proof, and David Copperfield made an elephant disappear right on stage too.

Wonder what locksmith got bribed or what blackbag team got an urgent call!

[steve-b]

The bottom line is that electronic voting is easy to subvert -- one crack into the system allows you to change as many votes as you like, unlike paper ballots where faking a thousand votes is a thousand times as much work (and a thousand times as much risk of getting caught) as faking one vote.

It's time to forget it and use straightforward paper ballots. Getting results an hour after the polls close is a luxury; trustworthy elections are a necessity.

[silverleaf]

ROFLMAO!

[nascarnation]

beat me to it, that's the sure flag for a bogus story

[DBrow]

"electronic voting is easy to subvert -- one crack into the system"

It is not easy to subvert a closely watched data system. Even harder to do it undetectably.

If it were easy, then computer-controlled doors and gates in a prison would all be open, the Pacer system the US courts use would issue pardons, and passenger flight schedules would be made to order for hackers, and the LATimes Editorial page would have my direct input.