My Vote Counts! Or Does it?

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!

Tags: America, Computer, Vince T, Work