How can Somebody Tamper with An Electronic Voting Machine? > 자유게시판

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The November 2006 elections that decided the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and native governments faced extra uncertainty than any election up to now. As an alternative of "Democrat or Republican," the more urgent ques­tion turned "accurate rely or full debacle?" Greater than 60 million Americans 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 virtually all digital voting since the machines were launched in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it is not just conspiracy theorists: For the previous three or four years, computer scientists have been tampering with voting machines to show it can be done. And they are saying it's really fairly easy. With digital voting, the complete setup is digital, not simply the precise casting of the vote. The voter is given a "sensible card" -- basically a credit score-card-kind gadget 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. If the model contains printout capabilities (which is required by more than half of U.S. If the printout is right, the voter inserts it into voting machine earlier than leaving the sales space to finish the voting course of. In non-print-out models, the voter leaves the sales space after forged his or her vote on the touchscreen. As soon as the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor's good 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, by way of 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 various safeguards in place to ensure nobody tampers with the voting machines -- that is an election we're speaking about, in spite of everything.

A few of those safeguards embody 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 evaluating the total votes on the memory card to the variety of voters at polling place and to a voting record saved on the machine's onerous disk (and to bodily printouts if out there). Machines are password protected and require particular access playing cards for anybody to get to the memory card, and most polling places conduct background checks of election employees. Lastly, the software program on these machines robotically encrypts every vote that is forged. So, the place does the problem are available in? Experts point out numerous areas that need improvement, but as you may most likely tell from the record of safeguards above, the memory card is considered to be the weakest level in the system. Princeton College laptop-science professor Edward Felton and a few his graduate students received themselves certainly one of the most common 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 Wave Workshop card they had contaminated with a virus. The virus altered the votes cast on the machine in a manner that would be undetectable to election officials, because the vote numbers were not only changed on the memory card, but additionally in the entire backup logs on the machine's laborious disk. So the ultimate numbers matched up just tremendous. One other report, this one by a pc science professor who is also an election volunteer, states that the security tape protected the memory card slot seems nearly exactly the same after someone removes it and then replaces it -- you have to carry the machine at a sure angle in the sunshine to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Other specialists focus on the software that information each vote. It's too easy, they are saying, and Memory Wave Workshop not encrypted effectively sufficient.