You all know I’m a huge technophile, but there’s nothing that scares me more than electronic voting machines. And it should scare you, too, if you want your vote to count in the election that’s coming in two weeks.

Sure, elections have been stolen since democracy began. But it’s never been this easy before. To do the “traditional” methods of stealing an election, such as ballot stuffing, restricting polling place access by means of intimidation, vandalizing individual machines to make them unusable, and counterfeiting ballots, you need several committed individuals at each polling place to really make it happen. Now, with electronic voting machines, a single bad apple can change millions of votes, affecting a local, state-wide, or even national election!

We’ve known that this was a problem for a while now. Earlier this month in the Netherlands, where 90% of the votes are cast on electronic voting machines, a group proved that with very brief access to a machine, anyone can re-program it to steal a pre-determined percentage of votes and give them to another party. They even re-flashed a voting machine to play chess!

But people are saying, “That’s just the stupid Dutch. Here in America, our machines are perfectly safe.” Manufacturers of the voting machines deny claims that they can be “hacked” by simply inserting a USB thumb-drive. They also claim that no one has access to the source-code for these machines, and therefore wouldn’t know how to re-program them. However, the source-code for a Diebold machine was anonymously sent to a former legislator in Maryland, where the electronic voting machine debate is raging at the moment.

So everything the manufacturers say is bullshit. I’m not surprised. Diebold is the same company that makes ATMs that can be hacked to think they give $5 bills instead of $20s just by entering a six-digit password in the PIN pad to get to service/diagnostic mode. (By the way, that password can be found legally online through a YouTube video or Google search.)

Maybe some of you are saying, “But Dinh, this still requires at least one individual going to every polling place and taking that one minute to hack a machine.” Not so, my little grasshopper. A motivated individual could make changes to the source-code in the manufacturer’s computers before it gets distributed to every machine. Or the little political-black-hatter could again do the one-minute hack, but make it a virus that infects the other voting machines as well. (They are networked together.)

Are you scared yet? I’m terrified! And yet some legislators still want to push ahead with these machines. What will it take to convince them otherwise? Perhaps an easy-to-understand guide on how to hack the election, freely published online. Or maybe not. We’ll see!