How to steal an election by hacking the vote

[kpete]

How to steal an election by hacking the vote
1 - One bad apple... 2 - E-voting 101: touch-screen machines and optical scanners 3 - Narrowing the focus: the Diebold AccuVote TS 4 - Wholesale fraud on the AccuVote TS 5 - (Mis)counting the vote 6 - The bad apple chart 7 - Conclusions: take-home points and parting thoughts By Jon "Hannibal" Stokes

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

One bad apple...

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I've followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.

Now, I won't be giving you the kind of "push this, pull here" instructions for cracking specific machines that you can find scattered all over the Internet, in alarmingly lengthy PDF reports that detail vulnerability after vulnerability and exploit after exploit. (See the bibliography at the end of this article for that kind of information.) And I certainly won't be linking to any of the leaked Diebold source code, which is available in various corners of the online world. What I'll show you instead is a road map to the brave new world of electronic election manipulation, with just enough nuts-and-bolts detail to help you understand why things work the way they do.

Along the way, I'll also show you just how many different hands touch these electronic voting machines before and after a vote is cast, and I'll lay out just how vulnerable a DRE-based elections system is to what e-voting researchers have dubbed "wholesale fraud," i.e., the ability of an individual or a very small group to steal an entire election by making subtle changes in the right places.

So let's get right down to business and meet the tools that we're going to use to flip a race in favor of our preferred candidate.

Note: I'm not in any way encouraging anyone to actually go out and steal an election. This article is intended solely as a guide to the kinds of information and techniques that election thieves already have available, and not as an incitement to or an aid for committing crimes.

much more (some great graphics) at:
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?opedpg=http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars/1&opedid=24973



Figure 6: The Diebold AccuVote TS software stack


Figure 8: Who interacts with a DRE

[texpatriot2004]

1. K & R for Transparent Democracy nm

[bleever]

2. This is an excellent and very comprehensive article,

well worth reading.

[greeneyedboy]

3. duplicate thread. the older/longer one is here.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2488801&mesg_id=2488801

[helderheid]

4. I posted screen captures of the entire article here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2489956