2008 Woodie Awards
What If... Electronic voting booths have a security problem?
Nathan Harrison, Staff Writer
Issue date: 10/24/06
Last Updated: 12/26/07
In Robin Williams' current film "Man Of The Year," the results of an election are called into question by the malfunction of electronic voting machines provided by a company named Delacroy. Though an element of a comedy, this plot line is ripped from a very real possibility: Electronic voting machines provided by the real-world company Diebold have had their security and reliability called into question. With midterm elections approaching, the possibility emerges - what if mass-electronic voter fraud actually occurred?
With the capitol currently embroiled in so many scandals, a bona-fide example of such corruption might be enough to break whatever party or interest was found responsible. A survey by the Wall Street Journal found the examples of Mark Foley, Harry Reid, George Allen and literally dozens of other Congress members, mired in varying levels of suspected and accused misdeeds, have reduced approval rates to 16 percent, their lowest level in the 17 years that paper has been surveying them.
Diebold itself has far from a clean record. Days after the 2004 presidential election, they settled out of court in a California fraud case, and their CEO resigned in December 2005 amid accusations of insider trading. The Ohio secretary of state up for re-election received $10,000 in campaign contributions from a Diebold lobbyist after his office negotiated a deal with Diebold to provide voting machines for use in that state's counties.
Most concerning of all, in September of this year, a student group from Princeton demonstrated that Diebold's electronic voting machines were vulnerable to tampering, including hacks that altered votes without any record of the alteration within the machine. In other words, votes could be stolen with Diebold machines, and there would be no evidence to ever suggest it.
One simple feature that critics of Diebold and electronic voting in general want to see implemented is a "paper trail" - a hard copy of voting records that prints out after a voter has submitted their electronic ballot, thus confirming their votes and providing a way to fact-check the results stored in the voting machines' memory.
With the capitol currently embroiled in so many scandals, a bona-fide example of such corruption might be enough to break whatever party or interest was found responsible. A survey by the Wall Street Journal found the examples of Mark Foley, Harry Reid, George Allen and literally dozens of other Congress members, mired in varying levels of suspected and accused misdeeds, have reduced approval rates to 16 percent, their lowest level in the 17 years that paper has been surveying them.
Diebold itself has far from a clean record. Days after the 2004 presidential election, they settled out of court in a California fraud case, and their CEO resigned in December 2005 amid accusations of insider trading. The Ohio secretary of state up for re-election received $10,000 in campaign contributions from a Diebold lobbyist after his office negotiated a deal with Diebold to provide voting machines for use in that state's counties.
Most concerning of all, in September of this year, a student group from Princeton demonstrated that Diebold's electronic voting machines were vulnerable to tampering, including hacks that altered votes without any record of the alteration within the machine. In other words, votes could be stolen with Diebold machines, and there would be no evidence to ever suggest it.
One simple feature that critics of Diebold and electronic voting in general want to see implemented is a "paper trail" - a hard copy of voting records that prints out after a voter has submitted their electronic ballot, thus confirming their votes and providing a way to fact-check the results stored in the voting machines' memory.
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