Don’t tell me you actually expected your vote to count!
Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.
“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”
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Indeed, the Argonne team’s attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine’s proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive “alien electronics” into the machine.
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“The cost of the attack that you’re going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities,” explains Warner in the video. “If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that’s another $15. So the total cost would be $26.”
From a modern technology point of view, there just ain’t much to a voting machine. It should be ridiculously easy to make it invulnerable. So, the only reason it isn’t has to be it is supposed to be insecure and easily hackable.
I will say only 1 thing here about electronic voting.
ANY general GEEK with abit of programming experience and understanding of Hardware could MAKE a good voting machine,,,and 99% unhackable.
The difficulty comes with WHO WANTS WHAT in these machines.
I think I’m going to throw this election.
Let’s see, I’m going to change only 50,000 machines to vote my way.
That would be … 50,000 X $15 = $750,000 for the electronics. Ok.
Not to mention having to make them myself to save on labor. Say 1 hour each for 50,000 hours labor.
Now, I will need secret access to 50,000 machines. Hummm…
Now I will need, say, 1/2 hour per machine to get it open, modify the machine, and close it up again. Another 25,000 hours.
So, for the 2012 election I will simply need $750,000, complete secrecy and 75,000 hours not including sleeping, eating, and travel time.
Yes, this sounds feasible.
The paper ballot was best. The rest keeps making things worse. Of course Dallas has a point that if you had to get a print out that you approved and dropped int a box there would be a paper trail. It would also cost more money and fail to print at least some of the time.
Yes, we have electronic machines over here which also produces a paper ballot receipt. It’s very simple and you can check your vote before you leave.
This entire article is FUD.
>> ECA said, on September 28th, 2011 at 2:33 pm
>> ANY general GEEK with abit of programming experience and understanding of Hardware could MAKE a good voting machine,,,and 99% unhackable.
Seems like a perfect project for the open source community. They are used to making stuff BOTH transparent and secure.
#25
Greg,
but WHO will acknowledge that its been done, CHEAPER, and Properly..
There is an OLD trick..and it works.
Getting ‘Persons’ unknown, to have multiple residences, in multiple states and locations.
Even as a “shadow agency” all you need is the residences, and Paper work for those places. Then make FAKE Picture ID for those persons.
Its been done for years.
There is something STUPID that the states have done, and its taking YEARS, DECADES to fix. Birth and death records, arnt KEPT UP, and many times they are Different departments(and the twain never meet)..
Greg,
it could be done with as much as a 486 8 megs, with Linux, and HTML.. you need voice so SOME may hear that they are voting on, and MULTI lingual..
Then SCAPE the board of all connections NOT NEEDED, and place the program LIVE in ram ONLY. And SAVE to an internal INCRIPTED 1-10 gig drive.
Check out this handy comparison of a Las Vegas Slot Machine vs. an Electronic Voting Machine.
http://tinyurl.com/2dktdhb
ECA,
I’m not sure the voting machines needs to verify the voters. That’s for the election officials to do.
Whatever the solution — a human readable paper ballot has to be the final voting authority for close elections. I don’t think the public would trust anything less tangible.
So, the voting machine would be, ultimately, just a fancy way to print a ballot.
The machines would tabulate the votes, of course, and in blow-out races that would be good enough. But in the close elections, the ballots can be hand counted by humans.
One more advantage to the printed ballot. It would end these claims that “the machine changed all my votes at the last second.”
If a voter can double-check the printed ballot before putting it in the ballot box. If there is a goof on it, they can tear it up and vote again.
I suspect the claims about machines changing votes at the last second are bogus. If there was fraud, I doubt they would do it right on the screen! Instead, I think people goof up their vote and blame the machine.
subtitle: “A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a **third** of all voters can be easily manipulated”
first paragraph: “Voting machines used by as many as a **quarter** of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked…”
huh?
“8th grade science education”
So no chance of it actually happening in America then?