This article may be moot by this time. My understanding is that the Diebold machines in question were vulnerable because they were ONLY electronic and had no paper trail. In my county we use electronic machines that count paper ballots — which means a recount of the paper ballots will expose any problems with the computer count.
I used an electronic machine, but I’m not sure which company
was involved.
It prints out the ballot. I get to look at that and it takes
it back and files it.
Now I have no idea if it saves my version, or if it saves a
new alternate version.
Main Findings The main findings of our study are:
1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold’s software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines’ hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.
The details of our analysis appear in the full version of this paper [PDF].
http://web.archive.org/web/20090404100612/http://citp.princeton.edu/voting/summary.html