This diary is a two-for-one. First- Diebold machines are broken, and the hackers at Ars have written an instruction manual for how to take advantage of the flaws. Second- Sequoia machines have a yellow button on the back which allows you to cast as many votes as you want! A small taste of the ArsTechnica article before the jump:
Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I've followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.
Gosh, I hope no one in San Diego has access to the internet. One of them might read this article at ars technica which spells out three different approaches to hacking an election, and then decide to try it on the official, certified machine they have, unsupervised and unsecured, IN THE TRUNK OF THEIR CAR.
This article is not for the layperson- it's written for programmers. It lays out the architecture of the Accuvote system, identifies the design flaws, and suggests obvious points of attack. It doesn't have specific code written for you- but it doesn't need to. There is already lots of known virus code floating around the web, some of it works on WindowsCE, and Diebold Accuvote machines don't run Norton AntiVirus.
Sure, it's not news to most of us that Diebold machines are easily hackable, or that anyone who has unsupervised physical access can upload arbitrary code that could run during the election... "but," you may say, "computer programming is HARD WORK. And I wouldn't even know where to start!"
That's OK. You don't have to do the job yourself. The beauty of the American Way is that you can pay someone else to do the dirty work for you.