We’ve done other stories on the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines and specifically rigging this machine, but now we have a Princeton research project showing that it almost seems like it was designed with rigging in mind. On their web site they have a full technical paper on how this works. Now go out and vote!

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. 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. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

A Diebold exec says the machine they tested had two year old software. It’s much better now. Then I wonder if would be willing to let the latest version be tested.

UPDATE: This just keeps getting better! Now it’s reported that a standard hotel minibar key will open the memory card slot door.