Hacking Democracy
Thursday, November 9th, 2006I watched the HBO documentary called “Hacking Democracy” last night and it was quite eye opening. They showed how a Diebold optical scanning voting machine was able to have it’s memory card altered to effectively “stuff” the ballot box in the favour of a candidate while maintaining the accuracy of the total vote count.
Without having looked at the software — because it is illegal thanks to the DMCA — I will speculate my thoughts on this situation.
The machine relies on removable memory cards in the same way that your camera does. This allows machines to be disconnected from a computer network, but relies on “sneaker net” to transfer the number of votes from each individual machine to the “central tabulator” which reads each memory card and sums up the totals for every machine in the election.
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