As
published on Slashdot, in their
"Politics" section,
WhiteDragon writes:
"The folks at Open Voting Foundation got their hands on a Diebold AccuVote TS touchscreen voting machine. They took it apart (pictures here), and found the most serious security flaw ever discovered in this machine. A single switch is all that is required to cause the machine to boot an unverified external flash instead of the builtin verified EEPROM."
Now the nerds are talking about how their votes could still matter when they're counted by the obviously insecure Diebold.
Update: NY Verified Voting reports their victory in inserting their activists into the NY State voting machine certification process. Just in time to help protect NY from replacing its familiar mechanical voting booths with insecure digital systems.
Update: Slashdot's editors revisited the story in their "Backslash" section, where they highlight their favorite comments and summarize the Nerds' discussions. Then the Nerds discuss that.
Geeks know that this insecurity means anyone can use a common keychain "thumbdrive" to start the machine, run any software they want to mess with its data, and walk away without leaving a trace. The thumbdrive can include big complex software to juggle voting data according to formulas that make the changes hard to detect. Those thumbdrives can be networked, even over mobile phones, to run districtwide or nationwide "tweaks" that don't raise eyebrows too much when compared with overall voting patterns, exit polls, other evidence of the actual public will.
A bad guy can walk up to a machine after the votes are collected, reboot it from their keychain, cheat the election results, shut down and walk away in a few minutes. It might even be possible to start in a few seconds, shut down any displays, walk away while the cheat software works, then just return a few minutes later to unplug and get away.
When will the criminals selling these machines to the criminals certifying and buying them be brought to justice? When will we ever have reason to believe in our voting integrity again? Help the Open Voting Foundation and Bev Harris' Black Box Voting Org to expose these criminal conspiracies and take back our country from the thieves.
