Oh, let me hack the ways

Vote Machine, how Might I Hack Thee?

American Sofflaw

So, where would Mr. Loki Nefarious start?
Actually the easiest way, and one that has to be mentioned is to own the machines, allowing you to install malicious software right at the factory.
This is not an idle speculation. All three of the top voting machine companies have strong ties to the Republican Party. And the CEO of Diebold vowed to “deliver” Ohio to Bush well before the votes were cast. It’s pretty easy to do if you own the machines.
Here is data on the ties to the Republican Party. The dollar contributions of the corporate devils that own these machines are at the bottom:
http://cronus.com/electionfraud/
In addition, the voting machine companies claim that the programming they use is “proprietary”, and that they do not have to show us the voters how they work. As the Daily Show described it, you vote, your vote goes into the machine where “things happen”. And that is all we get to know as taxpayers and citizens. We are not allowed to see how our votes are counted.
http://www.slate.com/id/2086455/
Even slot machines are regulated more than our vote machines. There, the government inspects the internal code, unlike the voting machines.
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Mar-27-Mon-2006/news/6527933.html

And, after you have sold the machines, and they have been ostensibly inspected, you can go by and install a “patch” to help your Republican buddies. And is it not by accident that felon Senator Bob Ney made sure there was no paper trail like there was in 2000. With a paper trail, we could prove the vote was hacked by actually counting the paper votes. No way, Jose! That would look too much like an actual democracy.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked/1

So, assume that Mr. Nefarious has access to the vote machine, but only for a very short time.

Here, they show you that not only can you hack the machine if left alone for 1 minute, but you can upload a VIRUS that will infect all the other vote machines in similar nefarious ways. Oh, and don’t worry about that key you need to open the machine. Any mini-bar key from a hotel room will open the lock:

http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/SecurityExecSum7-3.pdf
And the easiest way of all to steal the election, just change the vote totals on the central machine. We also know that the software for all of this is based on the Microsoft Windows operating system, and by simply altering an ACESS database, you can change voter totals at will.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm
And here is a fun demonstration with a serious discussion of the issues involved after.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00198.htm
http://www.dcnet2000.com/~neural/Voting/VotingFraudExample.html
Blackbox voting has shown it can be hacked by inserting a pre-loaded memory card. About security, one expert exclaims: "It's not that they left the door open. There is no door. This system is 'open for business.'"
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/5921.html
Also, Open Voting consortium has found that the entire operating system of the Dieblod machines can be change with a simple switch on the motherboard.
http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1
Then they talk about the voting machines that have wi-fi cards installed. Yep, think about that. Here you have a voting machine with a wi-fi card which connects it to the Internet. And this guy confirms my fears as to what that means.
All you need do to hack these machines is cruise down the street with a laptop that has wi-fi, and find the IP address of the machine. That’s right. Any computer science major with said laptop can hack the election, and then install a virus if he wanted to infect all of the machines like that one.
This guy also gives a real good overview of the myriad of vulnerabilities from a theoretical level.
http://www.arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars
Oh, and did I tell you that these machines run a primitive version of WINDOWS that is vulnerable to all 75,000 known WINDOWS vulnerabilities. (Bless you BradBLog!) That’s right, 75,000 ways to hack the machines.
Not only does BradBlog have that, he has posted the 200 page report on Diebold security problems in its entirety to his site. Mr Nefarious is getting happier all the time.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3731
Security? We don’t need no stinking security! Here are step by step instructions on how to get past the security.
http://www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html
A few keystrokes in ACCESS software, and you get to change election. Here are step by step instructions on how to change the vote totals using ACCESS. Remember, Diebold has two sets of access files (like two sets of books in accounting), so Mr. Nefarious has to change both sets of books.
http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevotedemo.htm
Here is a description of the Diebold internal vote tally systems, complete with another set of instructions on hacking the access databases.
http://www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html
Here is a research project where the intent was to simulate the hacking of the vote. This is interesting from the theoretical standpoint.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/hackavote2004.pdf

And you definitely want to read the historic Hursti reports From BlackBox Voting on hacking the machines. I liked it when he had the vote machine ask “Are we having fun yet?”
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy-supp.pdf
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf
Ok, until 11/3/2006, when blackboxvoting.org published this, my favorite hack was driving around with a wi-fi laptop. But this is just too sweat! All you have to do to hack the Sequoia vote machine is push a yellow button in the back , touch the screen in a certain place, and you can vote as many times as you want.
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/44823.html
And, Diebold has installed three different sets of “books” and has installed backdoors in the software to allow machines to be hacked:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/biggerthanwatergate.html
The Diebold machine is the poster child of insecure voting systems because they have been shown to be hackable in a number of different ways.
Here are some words that we should all bear in mind from Newsweek.

"If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor and elections-security expert.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek

But, of course, building an inherently hackable machine was exactly what Diebold intended to do.

Consider that Diebold makes ATM’s that track every penny and are totally secure. These methods to hack the machines were put there purposely, so as to allow for some excuse other than factory installed malicious software to explain what happened to the machine vote counting software. These machines were designed to be hacked.

And Diebold is not alone. All of the machines have severe security flaws as described in the above references.
Yet the voting machines that they built can be hacked at least a dozen ways from sideways. These machines are less secure than slot machines. AND, there is no way that a company that makes ATM’s can say they don’t know any better.
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Mar-27-Mon-2006/news/6527933.html
Conclusion: It is not only possible, but actually easy to hack these voting machines in a variety of ways and steal the election.