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Pull the Plug on Electronic Voting
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Forbes
Posted: November 11th, 2006
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/forbes/2006/0904/040.html
You don't like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives. I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p. So why am I advocating the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century? The 2000 debacle in Florida spurred a rush to computerize voting. While computers are very proficient...we should not rely on computers alone to count votes in public elections. The people who program them make mistakes. They are more vulnerable to manipulation than most people realize. Even an event as common as a power glitch could cause a hard disk to fail or a magnetic card that holds votes to permanently lose its data. In a 2003 election in Boone County, Ind., DREs recorded 144,000 votes in one precinct populated with fewer than 6,000 registered voters. Consider one simple mode of attack...called overwriting the boot loader. In overwriting it an attacker can, for example, make the machine count every fifth Republican vote as a Democratic vote, swap the vote outcome at the end of the election or produce a completely fabricated result. To stage this attack, a night janitor at the polling place would need only a few seconds' worth of access to the computer's memory card slot. DREs have a transparency problem: You can't easily discover if they've been tinkered with. It's one thing to suspect that officials have miscounted hanging chads, but something else entirely for people to wonder whether a corrupt programmer working behind the scenes has rigged a computer to help his side.
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