Thread: How to Hack An Election

Originally Posted by UrbanMan

Seems it is disturbingly easy to do.

How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes - POLITICO Magazine

No sooner did a team of bewildered deliverymen roll the 250-pound device into a conference room near Appel’s cramped, third-floor office than the professor set to work. He summoned a graduate student named Alex Halderman, who could pick the machine’s lock in seven seconds. Clutching a screwdriver, he deftly wedged out the four ROM chips—they weren’t soldered into the circuit board, as sense might dictate—making it simple to replace them with one of his own: A version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine’s results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. The attack was concluded in minutes.

That's not really hacking as the term is understood today, is it?. That's showing that insiders(those who have authorized access to the voting machines) can use firmware to obtain desired election results. I guess it could also be called pre-programming in advance of the election.

What's more is that each individual voting machine doesn't need tampered with as Appel did, but the more centralized computers and programs that do the vote counting is where the real damage can be done. The latter are counting not only the votes from the touch screen voting machines but also votes from other types of ballots that are optically scanned...I'm assuming this would include paper absentee ballots as well.

I had posted on another thread(recount thread?) that these machines don't have to be hacked to alter election results...


Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program | Scoop News

excerpt:

Diebold Elections Systems AccuVote systems use software called "GEMS," and this system is used in 37 states. The voting system works like this:

Voters vote at the precinct, running their ballot through an optical scan, or entering their vote on a touch screen.

After the polls close, poll workers transmit the votes that have been accumulated to the county office. They do this by modem.

At the county office, there is a "host computer" with a program on it called GEMS. GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger. But in the files we examined, which were created by Diebold employees and/or county officials, we learned that the Diebold program used another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it made yet a third vote ledger with another copy.

Apparently, the Elections Supervisor never sees these three sets of books. All she sees is the reports she can run: Election summary (totals, county wide) or a detail report (totals for each precinct). She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden. And here is what is quite odd: On the programs we tested, the Election summary (totals, county wide) come from the vote ledger 2 instead of vote ledger 1, and ledger 2 can be altered so it may or may not match ledger 1.

Now, think of it like this: You want the report to add up only the actual votes. But, unbeknownst to the election supervisor, votes can be added and subtracted from vote ledger 2. Official reports come from vote ledger 2, which has been disengaged from vote ledger 1. If one asks for a detailed report for some precincts, though, the report comes from vote ledger 1. Therefore, if you keep the correct votes in vote ledger 1, a spot check of detailed precincts (even if you compare voter-verified paper ballots) will always be correct.

And what is vote ledger 3 for? For now, we are calling it the "Lord Only Knows" vote ledger.

I'm pretty sure that I posted several items about this "GEMS" vote tallying system in that other thread.