Article by George Norman

On 28 Oct 2008

Here is a tip for those of you with basic computer skills and an interest in the upcoming US elections: hacking into certain e-voting machines takes just 7 minutes. Normally this would not cause much of a stir, but the elections are due to be held in just a few days time. Using these “prone to hacking” machines may indeed have an impact.

The e-voting machine in question is the Sequoia AVC Advantage 9.00H direct-recording electronic (DRE) touch-screen machine, manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems and used in New Jersey (among other states). The whole thing is adequately explained in a 158-page report put together by researchers from Princeton University. It seems that a person with basic computer skills can hack the machine in about 7 minutes. Another way to steal votes is to have an interested party replace a chip on the e-voting machine's main circuit board. According to Andrew Appel, computer science professor at Princeton University, there are numerous opportunities during the deployment of these machines when someone could tamper with them, not to mention that it would be almost impossible to detect which machines have been tampered with.


The phenomenon is not restricted to New Jersey. The ES&S iVotronics touch-screen voting machines which are used in states like West Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri and Texas have as well proven to be unreliable. Reports from the four states mentioned before state that the machines switched the votes – some of them did this right in front of the voter. The whole thing resembles a Simpsons episode that leaked to the Internet at the start of the month. In this episode Homer goes to vote, but his Obama vote is switched for a McCain vote – six times. To some it may seem like the cartoon is just making fun of the elections, but it seems that with these hackable and faulty voting machines the whole thing is actually possible.



Tags: Hacking, e-voting

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