Sorry DIEBOLD, eVoting Can Be Hacked

This story on a controlled (and unfortunately for DIEBOLD, videotaped) test of their election software shows how easily the electronic voting system can be hacked. The scary part is that this kind of hack would likely never be caught, because the totals would still balance - no ballot box stuffing here.

At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report" was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.

The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied "ender card" was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.

Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6

However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1

The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator, a step cited by Diebold as a protection against memory card hacking. The central tabulator is the "mother ship" that pulls in all votes from voting machines. However, the GEMS central tabulator failed to notice that the voting machines had been hacked.
The results in the central tabulator read:

Yes:7 ; No:1

DIEBOLD also makes ATM machines, which work well because a limited amount of failure is tolerable. People watch their money VERY carefully and there are many laws and audits in place, so that small problems are caught and corrected quickly. Voting - especially the secret ballot - is much harder to police. I am betting DIEBOLD spins off or closes its eVoting division soon, since there is no way to come back from this in a P.R. manner.