How to steal an election

ArsTechnica has a detailed article on how to subvert electronic voting machines.  Part of me wants to stand outside polling places and hand these out.  The state of electronic voting in this country is a debacle, and it seems to me that most people would be outraged if they understood just how easily their vote could be nullified.

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7 Comments

  1. Didn’t the governor of Maryland want to remove the electronic voting machines but the state congress voted to keep them.

    They complained about the old systems being to difficult to understand. So their solution…modernize. And they passed laws mandating new modernized machines. So they rush them into place without testing.

    What the frig did they expect to happen?

    Of course, I am sure it will all be the conservatives faults. I think we’d solve a lot of problems if we required social security numbers in order to vote. *shrug* It’s one of the few things I DO believe you should need your SSN for.

    I know when I was in Connecticut, they allowed anyone to go down to town hall and cast a vote in the Presidential election. All you had to provide was proof of citizenship. And for that, I think they pretty much took driver’s license. That was all you needed.

    So it was very easy to mail your absentee ballot to Florida (a large number of Connecticut residents live in Florida) and then go cast a second vote for president in Connecticut.

    Come on…can we get any less kosher? Well, I guess at least we didn’t have dead people voting like in some states. *lol*

    1. I can’t see how proof of SSNs is going to address the issue here at all. No amount of identity verification is going to change the fact that the machine entered a different vote than the one you thought you made, or that it “forgot” the vote, or that someone cut the security tape over the PCMCIA port, thus invalidating every vote it recorded.

  2. I…

    want to steal an election.. but I’m not a member, so I couldn’t read the report…

    Should I become a member?

    tell me!

    1. Re: I…

      Membership is only required for the PDF version. You can still read the whole article in HTML. Just click the “Next >>” link at the bottom of the page to go from section to section.

    1. yeah, the ArsTechnica article references Princeton’s work heavily.

      Scary stuff.

      At least when the DoD contracts for a big piece of software, they draw up a spec beforehand with stringent safety and reliability requirements. I get the impression that with these voting machines, Diebold just marched a bunch of marketroids into representatives offices, put on a big dog-and-pony show pulled directly out of their asses, and relied on the fact that the people making the buying decisions are still trying to figure out how to use a browser to insure that their pre-written contract would be accepted with no questions asked.

      1. Ah: the Redmond approach.
        Actually, what worries me is not the election itself, but the endless tooth-extraction afterwards where the losing side contends that the victors rigged the election.
        May Destiny give us unambiguous results, whatever they are.

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