How Can Somebody Tamper With An Digital Voting Machine

De Transcription | Bibliothèque patrimoniale numérique Mines ParisTech
Révision datée du 27 octobre 2025 à 02:24 par ShariPilpel279 (discussion | contributions) (Page créée avec « <br>The November 2006 elections that decided the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and local governments confronted extra uncertainty than any election to date. As an... »)
(diff) ← Version précédente | Voir la version actuelle (diff) | Version suivante → (diff)
Aller à : navigation, rechercher


The November 2006 elections that decided the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and local governments confronted extra uncertainty than any election to date. As an alternative of "Democrat or Republican," the more urgent ques­tion grew to become "accurate count or complete debacle?" Greater than 60 million People solid their votes on digital voting machines for the primary time in 2006. Some feared human and machine error, both of which have occurred in nearly all digital voting because the machines have been introduced in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it's not just conspiracy theorists: For the previous three or four years, laptop scientists have been tampering with voting machines to prove it can be accomplished. And they say it's truly fairly easy. With digital voting, the whole setup is digital, not simply the actual casting of the vote. The voter is given a "good card" -- principally a credit-card-kind machine with a microchip in it -- that activates the digital voting machine.



The voter casts his or her vote by touching a reputation on the display screen. If the mannequin consists of printout capabilities (which is required by greater than half of U.S. If the printout is correct, the voter inserts it into voting machine before leaving the booth to complete the voting process. In non-print-out models, the voter leaves the booth after cast his or her vote on the touchscreen. As soon as the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor's smart card into the voting machine and enters a password to access the tally of all votes on that machine. Election officials either transmit the tallies electronically, through a community connection, Memory Wave 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 verify no one tampers with the voting machines -- this 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 Memory Wave Experience the technique of evaluating the overall votes on the memory card to the variety of voters at polling place and to a voting report stored on the machine's exhausting disk (and to bodily printouts if accessible). Machines are password protected and require particular entry playing cards for anybody to get to the memory card, and most polling places conduct background checks of election workers. Finally, the software program on these machines robotically encrypts every vote that's cast. So, the place does the problem are available? Specialists point out numerous areas that want enchancment, however as you possibly can in all probability tell from the list of safeguards above, the memory card is considered to be the weakest point in the system. Princeton University pc-science professor Edward Felton and a couple of his graduate students bought themselves one in every of the commonest voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and had their method with it.



They picked the lock blocking entry to the memory card and replaced it with a memory card that they had infected with a virus. The virus altered the votes forged on the machine in a means that can be undetectable to election officials, because the vote numbers weren't solely modified on the memory card, but also in all the backup logs on the machine's exhausting disk. So the final numbers matched up just tremendous. One other report, this one by a pc science professor who can be an election volunteer, states that the safety tape protected the Memory Wave Experience card slot appears to be like almost precisely the identical after someone removes it after which replaces it -- you've to carry the machine at a sure angle in the light to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Other consultants give attention to the software program that records every vote. It is too easy, they are saying, and not encrypted nicely sufficient.