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 so far. As a substitute of "Democrat or Republican," the more urgent question became "correct rely or complete debacle?" More than 60 million Americans solid their votes on electronic voting machines for the primary time in 2006. Some feared human and machine error, both of which have occurred in almost all electronic voting because the machines were launched in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it isn't just conspiracy theorists: For the previous three or 4 years, computer scientists have been tampering with voting machines to prove it can be achieved. And they say it's really fairly straightforward. With electronic voting, the whole setup is digital, not simply the precise casting of the vote. The voter is given a "smart card" -- mainly a credit-card-type system with a microchip in it -- that activates the electronic voting machine.
The voter casts his or her vote by touching a name on the display screen. If the mannequin contains printout capabilities (which is required by more than half of U.S. If the printout is correct, the voter inserts it into voting machine earlier than leaving the sales space to complete the voting course of. In non-print-out fashions, the voter leaves the booth after forged his or her vote on the touchscreen. Once the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor's sensible 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 level out that there are lots of safeguards in place to verify nobody tampers with the voting machines -- this is an election we're talking about, in any case.
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Some of those 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 technique of comparing the entire votes on the memory card to the variety of voters at polling place and Memory Wave to a voting document stored on the machine's hard disk (and to bodily printouts if obtainable). Machines are password protected and require particular access playing cards for Memory Wave anybody to get to the memory card, and most polling locations conduct background checks of election staff. Lastly, the software on these machines mechanically encrypts each vote that is cast. So, where does the issue are available? Specialists level out plenty of areas that want enchancment, but as you may in all probability inform from the checklist of safeguards above, the memory card is taken into account to be the weakest level in the system. Princeton College computer-science professor Edward Felton and a couple of his graduate students acquired themselves one of the most typical voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and had their approach with it.
They picked the lock blocking entry to the memory card and changed it with a memory card they had infected with a virus. The virus altered the votes solid on the machine in a means that would be undetectable to election officials, because the vote numbers weren't only modified on the Memory Wave Audio card, but in addition in all the backup logs on the machine's laborious disk. So the final numbers matched up just nice. One other report, this one by a computer science professor who can also be an election volunteer, states that the security tape protected the memory card slot looks nearly precisely the identical after somebody removes it and then replaces it -- you may have to carry the machine at a sure angle in the light to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Other consultants concentrate on the software program that records each vote. It's too simple, they are saying, and never encrypted effectively enough.