The November 2006 elections that decided the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and local governments confronted more uncertainty than any election to date. Instead of "Democrat or Republican," the extra pressing question turned "correct depend or full debacle?" Greater than 60 million Americans solid their votes on electronic voting machines for the first time in 2006. Some feared human and machine error, each of which have occurred in virtually all digital voting because the machines have been introduced in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it is not just conspiracy theorists: For the previous three or 4 years, pc scientists have been tampering with voting machines to show it can be done. And they are saying it's actually fairly simple. With electronic voting, your entire setup is electronic, not just the precise casting of the vote. The voter is given a "good card" -- principally a credit score-card-type device with a microchip in it -- that activates the electronic voting machine.
The voter casts his or her vote by touching a reputation on the screen. If the model includes printout capabilities (which is required by greater than half of U.S. If the printout is right, the voter inserts it into voting machine before leaving the booth to complete the voting course of. In non-print-out models, the voter leaves the sales space after forged his or her vote on the touchscreen. Once the polling place has closed, Memory Wave an election official inserts a supervisor's smart card into the voting machine and enters a password to entry the tally of all votes on that machine. Election officials either transmit the tallies electronically, via a community connection, to a central location for the county, or else carry the memory card by hand to the central location. Election officials point out that there are numerous safeguards in place to make sure no one tampers with the voting machines -- that is an election we're talking about, in spite of everything.
A few of these safeguards embrace 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 evaluating the full votes on the memory card to the variety of voters at polling place and Memory Wave Program to a voting file stored on the machine's hard disk (and to bodily printouts if obtainable). Machines are password protected and require special entry cards for anybody to get to the memory card, and most polling locations conduct background checks of election workers. Lastly, the software program on these machines automatically encrypts each vote that is cast. So, the place does the problem are available in? Specialists point out a lot of areas that want enchancment, but as you possibly can most likely tell from the record of safeguards above, the memory card is taken into account to be the weakest level within the system. Princeton College laptop-science professor Edward Felton and a couple of his graduate students obtained themselves one in all the most typical voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and Memory Wave had their approach with it.
They picked the lock blocking entry to the memory card and replaced it with a Memory Wave Program card they'd contaminated with a virus. The virus altered the votes forged on the machine in a means that can be undetectable to election officials, as a result of the vote numbers were not solely changed on the memory card, but in addition in all of the backup logs on the machine's laborious disk. So the final numbers matched up just high-quality. Another report, this one by a computer science professor who is also an election volunteer, states that the security tape protected the memory card slot seems to be virtually precisely the identical after someone removes it after which replaces it -- you have got to hold the machine at a certain angle in the sunshine to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Different experts focus on the software that data each vote. It is too easy, they say, and never encrypted nicely enough.