Electronic Voting Machines Proven Vulnerable to Hacking

If the above is accepted as true, then the perpetuation of the American Republic is in peril.

To understand the scope of the threat to U.S. elections, one must keep the following fact in mind: Almost all voters in Georgia, Maryland, Utah, and Nevada, and the majority of voters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Texas, will cast their ballots using electronic voting devices on Election Day in 2012.

Now follows the chilling report published in Salon: "Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education."

This is the fragile state of affairs according to the computer science and security experts employed at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. After conducting numerous experiments on the machines used by millions of American voters, this group of experts reportedly found that “the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.”

The head of this cadre of computer consultants, Roger Johnston, warned:

We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines. We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.

The sample machine used by the Argonne team was the Diebold Accuvote voting system. The device was obtained from a “former Diebold contractor.”

While previous laboratory experiments on the vulnerability of similar devices demonstrated that an extraordinary amount of coding savvy would be required to hack these electronic voting machines, this latest investigation showed that for an attack on the machine’s software to be successful, “no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine’s proprietary source code” was necessary.

A video of the experiment is available at bradblog.com.

It isn’t as if the Argonne findings are novel. In fact, for years scientists — of both the political and computer variety — have sounded alarms regarding the security of these machines that are playing an increasingly key role in numerous elections around the country. According to the Salon piece, many experts inside and outside of the government have declared repeatedly that improvements in technology and the ready availability thereof were making tampering with these devices not only simple, but likely irresistible.

Admittedly, the placement of the type of machine used in the Argonne experiment — the touch-screen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems — has decreased slightly as news of its vulnerability has spread. However, a DRE machine nearly identical to the one hacked for 10 bucks by members of the Argonne team will be used again in November 2012. Deployment by states of these easily manipulated machines is astounding in light of experiments and findings thereof reported for years now.

The most alarming aspect of the widespread reliance on these DRE machines is the fact that according to verifiedvoting.org, nearly one-third of Americans who will cast votes on Election Day 2012 will have no choice but to do so using one of these devices. Citizens of states exclusively employing the voting machines should immediately recur to their state government for an explanation of such a seemingly inexplicable decision.