Flaw - or Benefit?
Nov 2nd, 2006 at 7:52 am by Susie
Imagine, trusting the integrity of the election to machines like this:
Days before the election, state officials have learned that California’s most widely used electronic voting machines feature a button in back that can allow someone to vote multiple times.
Several computer scientists said Wednesday that the vulnerability found in all touch-screen machines sold by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems was not especially great because using the yellow button for vote fraud would require reaching far behind the voting machine twice and triggering two beeps.
“If the machine beeps loudly and someone has their arms wrapped around the machine, the poll workers are going to become suspicious,” said David Wagner, a computer security and voting system expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s kind of hard for me to see how this could be used very widely,” he said. “It’s retail fraud, so it’s onesies and twosies and can only affect very close races.”
A former poll worker in Tehama County tried alerting state elections officials to the vulnerability about a month ago and said he was told the problem did not seem significant. Ron Watt then obtained poll worker-training documents through a public records request and brought them to the attention last Friday of the state’s chief voting systems tester.
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Why is it we only hear stories about these machines sending Democratic votes to Republicans?
Because that’s the way they’re designed, silly!