ArsTechnica: "How to Steal an Election by Hacking the Vote"

["Joe Pezzillo" <jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars


"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."