The November 2006 elections that decided the make - up of the U.S. Congress and res publica and local government activity face more uncertainty than any election to date . Instead of " Democrat or Republican , " the more pressing question became " precise numeration or complete drubbing ? " More than 60 million Americans cast their votes on electronic voting machines for the first time in 2006 . Some dread human and motorcar misplay , both of which have occur in almost all electronic voting since the machine were introduce in limited scope in 2002 . Others fear a glowering foe , and it ’s not just cabal theorists : For the past three or four years , data processor scientist have been tampering with ballot machine to prove it can be done . And they say it ’s actually fairly loose .
With electronic voting , the entire setup is electronic , not just the actual casting of the vote . The general outgrowth of electronic voting on the most common touchscreen models goes something like this :
Election officials point out that there are many safeguard in place to make certain no one tampers with the voting auto – this is an election we ’re talk about , after all . Some of those safe-conduct include tamping bar - resistant tape over the machine ’s memory lineup slot , a lock over the memory card slot and the machine ’s battery , and the process of compare the total votes on the memory notice to the numeral of voter at polling place and to a voting record stored on the car ’s unvoiced disk ( and to physical printouts if available ) . machine are password protected and require special admittance cards for anyone to get to the store card , and most polling place lead screen background balk of election workers . in conclusion , the software on these machine mechanically cypher every vote that is cast . So , where does the job come in ?
expert point out slew of areas that require improvement , but as you may plausibly tell from the list of safeguards above , the remembering card is considered to be the unaccented stage in the system . Princeton University computer - science prof Edward Felton and a twosome of his graduate scholarly person mother themselves one of the most plebeian balloting machines – a Diebold AccuVote - TS – and had their way with it . They picked the lock blocking access to the memory wit and replaced it with a memory card they had infected with avirus . The virus altered the votes cast on the machine in a way that would be insensible to election official , because the suffrage numbers were not only changed on the memory board visiting card , but also in all of the backup logs on the automobile ’s hard disk . So the final numbers gibe up just fine . Another account , this one by a data processor skill prof who is also an election Tennessean , states that the security system tape protected the memory card slot looks almost exactly the same after someone removes it and then replace it – you have to hold the simple machine at a certain angle in the light to see the " VOID " impression that come up after monkey .
Other expert focus on the software that record each vote . It ’s too simple , they say , and not encrypted well enough . The distinctive computer code is a standard " Roger Moore = 1 " and " Sean Connery = 2 " type of apparatus , which even a computer neophyte could monkey with if they have access to the machine . All it would take is a retentivity identity card with a bug load onto it to switch the values . Also at issue is the case of encryption used in the vote car , which experts say is far from state of the art . But at least in the case of the Diebold machines , experts really only have access code to one elder version of the software that was leaked through a security hole in the Diebold connection , so no one can be certain whether the same flaws exist in the latest rendering of the course of study . Diebold wo n’t free the software for public review because it ’s proprietary .
Beyond the machine itself , the method of electronically transferring tallies between polling places and a cardinal location for the county is another potential point of helplessness . A drudge can intercept the vote tallies on their fashion to the cardinal enumeration locating by tie a what amounts to a tap at the internet router or hub . He or she could grab the numbers on their way across the mesh – which in many cases is n’t encrypt – and load up a dissimilar set of tallies in their place . However , as long as the fundamental location double stop the electronically channel numbers with the memory cards and printout from each polling place , this method acting of pseudo would at last go bad .
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