Hacking the Electronic Voting Machines

Are you worried that electronic voting machines are undermining American democracy? You should be.

Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland Democratic legislator, was shocked when she opened her mail Wednesday morning.

Inside, she discovered three computer discs. With them was an anonymous letter saying the discs contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland’s new electronic voting machines.

“My understanding is that with these disks a malicious person could skew the outcome of an election,” Kagan said.

Diebold, the company that makes the voting machines, told ABC News, “These discs do not alter the security of the Diebold touch-screen system in any way,” because election workers can set their own passwords.

But ABC News has obtained an independent report commissioned by the state of Maryland and conducted by Science Applications International Corporation revealing that the original Diebold factory passwords are still being used on many voting machines.

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Computer experts and government officials have voiced serious concerns that if these machines malfunction, no paper record will exist for a recount. Even worse is the fear that an election could be hacked.

Princeton University researchers using an Accuvote TS — a touch screen version of the Diebold machine — showed how easy it would be to deploy a virus that would, in seconds, flip the vote of any election.

Read the full story on ABC news: Electronic Voting Machines Could Skew Elections.

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4. A movement for open-source voting machines
5. Computer Programmer Admits to Writing Program to Fix Election for Republican Congressman