Blog: Pete Loshin

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When Can We Open Source Voting Machines?

Some more interesting news about Diebold voting hi-jinks in Rolling Stone magazine. Read all about it in Will The Next Election Be Hacked?.

I won't rehash the history and controversy over electronic voting issues, I'll just point to two recent reports about just how secure Diebold's voting machines are. First, this research paper titled Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine. The bottom line: not good.

And second, one of the co-authors of that paper blogged that “Hotel Minibar” Keys Open Diebold Voting Machines. The kind of key you, or anyone, can order over the Internet.

Diebold has long claimed it's too complicated to add a printed audit trail of all votes made on their electronic machines (something that is apparently not too complicated to do for cash registers), and that those machines are secure as all heck.

But, according to Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten, it just isn't so. Check out the main page for their research at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. It includes a link to the paper as well as to scary video and other links about electronic voting.

Even if you don't check any of the links, this snippet from the abstract should be enough to scare you:

"...Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus...."

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