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Electronic voting machines are perfect devices for fixing elections. The output can be correct or anything that the programmer decided it should be or anything a clever hacker can make it be and the audit trail is infinitely rewritable, in other words, no trail at all. Paper records of votes would at least make recounts possible but this measure has been opposed by both manufacturers and politicians. However, in the far more important field of the Casino, gambling machines have more stringent requirements than voting machines.
Electronic voting software is proprietary. It is a trade secret and nobody is allowed to see the source to check that it does what it says it does. On the other hand, open source has been proposed as a way to reduce the chances that deliberate bias is being put into the counting code. However, there still remains a big problem - the idiots administering the system.
The highlights in the above link are:
The new overseas and military voting system went on-line for a hack test.
A team from U Michigan took total control of the system 36 hours later. The problem was that the master password was 4 characters long and ... it was the default password in the manual!!!
While they had control of the system they detected hack attempts from China and Iran and so they changed the password to make it harder to get in. They also found a list of voters with PIN numbers in the file system. Conclusion - the administrators running voting software are not too terribly aware of security issues (even relatively simple concepts).
Electronic voting software is proprietary. It is a trade secret and nobody is allowed to see the source to check that it does what it says it does. On the other hand, open source has been proposed as a way to reduce the chances that deliberate bias is being put into the counting code. However, there still remains a big problem - the idiots administering the system.
The highlights in the above link are:
The new overseas and military voting system went on-line for a hack test.
A team from U Michigan took total control of the system 36 hours later. The problem was that the master password was 4 characters long and ... it was the default password in the manual!!!
While they had control of the system they detected hack attempts from China and Iran and so they changed the password to make it harder to get in. They also found a list of voters with PIN numbers in the file system. Conclusion - the administrators running voting software are not too terribly aware of security issues (even relatively simple concepts).
