A quick cut & paste from the SF Chron
Hacker to try to attack state voting machines
John Wildermuth, Chronicle Political Writer
Friday, November 25, 2005
A computer hacker will be trying to break into one of California's electronic voting machines next week, with the full cooperation of the secretary of state.
Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, will be trying to demonstrate that voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems are vulnerable to attacks by computer hackers seeking to manipulate the results of an election.
They've already proven their point in Florida
Last May, Hursti and another computer security expert tested a Diebold system for the elections supervisor in Leon County, Fla. They quickly broke into the system, changed the voting results and inserted a new program that flashed the message "Are we having fun yet?" on the computer screens.
Don't mess with California...
The California test will use a randomly selected voting machine from one of the 17 counties that use a Diebold system -- either touch screen or optical scan machines. The original plan for the test would have used a machine provided by Diebold, something opposed by the state and the critics of the company.
"We want to test a machine that's already been used in a California election,'' said Jim March, an investigator for Black Box Voting, the consumer group bringing in Hursti for the test. "We want to avoid a so-called 'lab queen,' a voting machine specially rigged for the test.''
Lab queens driving around in Mercedes' while stealing our votes.
Bye bye Diebold, bye bye?