Voting Machines
Voting machines are uncertified, often produce no audit trail, and are made by hard right-wing Republicans. The US is probably the only country in which election infrastructure is in the hands of private partisans.
As if that were not enough of a problem, the source code for these machines is proprietary and is protected as a trade secret, so it is not available for audit. By accident, some of it leaked out (It seems Diebold's web site was not secured.)
Diebold Source Code!!! --by ouranos (dailykos.com) "Dr. Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University. He 'accidentally' got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software program--Diebold's source code--which runs their e-voting machines. Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this software. One line in particular stood out over all the rest: #defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4" All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not having the key... The line that staggered the Hopkins team was that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked. I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the reason this was allowed to happen. This wasn't a mistake by any stretch of the imagination."
Open Voting Foundation supports solutions for open voting. These solutions include software using open standard specifications that can be inspected by the public for flaws and even improved by the public. The software must also capture and count votes in ways that the voter can verify individually and would be statistically impossible to tamper with on any significant scale.
Connecticut
Connecticut uses Diebold machines that are programmed by a Massachusetts firm. The University of Connecticut has identified massive vulnerabilities, the programming is outsourced so that we have no way of verifying the code, and the experience in the last election is that the custody of the machines has also been compromised. So how did it work out last November ? Take a look at this.
Evaluation of CT's voting machines from the
University
of Connecticut and others is troubling. According to the
report: the Diebold machines "can be compromised with off-the-shelf
equipment in a matter of minutes even if the machine has its removable memory
card sealed in place. The basic attack can be applied to effect a
variety of results, including entirely neutralizing one candidate so that their
votes are not counted, swapping the votes of two candidates, or biasing the
results by shifting some votes from one candidate to another. Such vote
tabulation corruptions can lay dormant until the election day, thus avoiding
detection through pre-election tests."
So how did it work out in Connecticut last November ? Take a look at this.
League of Women Voters of Connecticut page doesn't talk about it.
Diana Urban, State Senator from Stonington, says she is working on it with True Vote Ct.
Hacking the Vote
Clinton Curtis testimony on elections before the Judiciary Committee.