Researchers Find Severe Flaws in Diebold Voting Machines

A group of Princeton computer scientists has published a study that examines flaws and vulnerabilities in Diebold's AccuVote-TS voting machines. Complete with a video that demonstrates the ease with which the electronic voting machine can be compromised, the study provides chilling insight into the serious risk of election tampering and fraud created by modern voting technology. The vote-stealing demonstration software developed by the computer scientists "can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss."

The study reveals that "[m]alicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection," and that the software can be installed on a voting machine in only a minute by anyone that has physical access.

Full Research Paper:

Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card foras little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities—a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

Brad Friedman on Election Fraud