The November 2006 elections that determined the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and local governments faced more uncertainty than any election to date. As a substitute of “Democrat or Republican,” the more urgent ques­tion became “accurate count or complete debacle?” Greater than 60 million Americans solid their votes on electronic voting machines for the primary time in 2006. Some feared human and machine error, each of which have occurred in virtually all digital voting since the machines had been launched in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it is not simply conspiracy theorists: For the previous three or MemoryWave 4 years, pc scientists have been tampering with voting machines to prove it can be done. And they say it is actually pretty simple. With digital voting, your entire setup is digital, not simply the actual casting of the vote. The voter is given a “smart card” -- mainly a credit score-card-sort device with a microchip in it -- that activates the electronic voting machine.
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The voter casts his or her vote by touching a name on the display screen. If the mannequin consists of printout capabilities (which is required by greater than half of U.S. If the printout is appropriate, the voter inserts it into voting machine before leaving the sales space to complete the voting course of. In non-print-out fashions, the voter leaves the sales space after solid his or her vote on the touchscreen. As soon as the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor’s good card into the voting machine and enters a password to access the tally of all votes on that machine. Election officials either transmit the tallies electronically, by way of a network connection, to a central location for the county, or else carry the Memory Wave card by hand to the central location. ­Election officials level out that there are lots of safeguards in place to make sure no one tampers with the voting machines -- that is an election we’re talking about, after all.

A few of those safeguards include tamper-resistant tape over the machine’s memory card slot, a lock over the memory card slot and the machine’s battery, and the strategy of comparing the overall votes on the memory card to the number of voters at polling place and to a voting file stored on the machine’s laborious disk (and to physical printouts if out there). Machines are password protected and require particular entry playing cards for anybody to get to the memory card, and most polling locations conduct background checks of election employees. Lastly, the software on these machines automatically encrypts every vote that’s solid. So, the place does the problem come in? Experts point out numerous areas that need enchancment, however as you can most likely inform from the listing of safeguards above, the memory card is considered to be the weakest point within the system. Princeton College computer-science professor Edward Felton and a few his graduate college students got themselves one in every of the most common voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and had their manner with it.

They picked the lock blocking access to the memory card and replaced it with a memory card that they had infected with a virus. The virus altered the votes cast on the machine in a method that could be undetectable to election officials, as a result of the vote numbers were not solely changed on the memory card, Memory Wave but in addition in all of the backup logs on the machine’s exhausting disk. So the ultimate numbers matched up simply advantageous. Another report, MemoryWave this one by a computer science professor who can be an election volunteer, states that the safety tape protected the memory card slot appears nearly exactly the identical after somebody removes it after which replaces it -- you will have to carry the machine at a sure angle in the light to see the “VOID” imprint that arises after tampering. Other specialists deal with the software program that information every vote. It is too simple, they say, and never encrypted effectively sufficient.