Diebold Hacking Example

The folks at Princeton University got hold of a Diebold electronic voting machine and have provided a stunning example (WMV video, approx 60MB — Right click on the link and select “Save As”) of how a voting machine can throw a handful of votes to whichever candidate the virus writer chooses. There is some wiggle room for skeptics to balk at this demo. It supposes there are some awfully desperate people out there who would do anything to make sure their candidate won, including finding a way to gain access to a voting machine, making sure the software does what it is supposed to, and hoping that election officials use the same memory card in each machine before setting them up. Coordinated efforts are necessary on some level to affect such a crime, but the bottom line is — it can be done. The possibility that Diebold would be involved in such a broad conspiracy that would allow easy access to these machines and, at the very least, serve to “turn a blind eye” to potential election-day criminals is pretty much unthinkable. This, even though the CEO of Diebold noted that he was committed to delivering Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush in the 2004 election.

These machines are not secure. In order to wipe out any possible threat to election legitimacy, it is high time that Diebold be pushed by our elected officials — Republicans and Democrats alike — to make these machines bulletproof.

Check out the whole story at Salon.com.

The above video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Video Credits: Princeton University – School of Engineering and Applied Science – Woodrow Wilson School