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Maybe I don’t have an 8th grade edumakashun, but wouldn’t you need either an I/O plug, or a wireless card, built into the voting machine to hack it???? Sounds verrry verrry fishy to me, kinda like setting up an excuse for a verrry large loss for the commies.... doesn’t make sense, and as Judge Judy says, if it doesn’t make sense, then it isn’t true....

That is precisely how the attack works, and the problem is that accessing the guts of the machine is so easy that the attack itself is relatively trivial. It appears that, essentially, the attacker takes an integrated circuit piece that contains the logic and the processor needed to tamper with the voting results and plugs it in between the wire that comes from the touchscreen and the socket on the machine's own logic and processing equipment. The attacker's IC logic/processing unit would then see all of the traffic passing from the touchscreen - the user interface - to the voting machine's own processors and would be able to manipulate those results so that the voting machine's processors would get the tainted vote. The attacker's equipment would then intercept the confirmation code sent back from the voting machine's processor and would replace that with its own version of the confirmation code that would "confirm" to the user that the vote they thought they cast was accepted when, in fact, it wasn't.

basically, what makes this attack so easy is that it is apparently just a matter of picking a simple little flange lock and then using pre-existing IC attachments to put the attacker's IC unit into place. If both the lock were harder to pick, the unit itself had tamper-resistant seals, and the entire exposed surface of the voting machine's hardware was solidstate with no plugs available for easy attachment of illicit hardware, this attack would be significantly harder. As it is, any poll watcher/election official who is in reality a plant or mole could, without too much risk of detection, open a voting machine and install the attack device in a matter of seconds, with no-one the wiser.

This isn't fishy, it's scary.

“the attacker takes an integrated circuit piece that contains the logic and the processor needed to tamper with the voting results”

The source code (Also one would need to know what langauge it’s written in) and the EXPENSIVE software that would be needed to complete this task and I’m pretty sure that’s not easily availabe to an 8th grader.