Hacking the Machines

HACKING THE MACHINES – By Sheila Parks, Ed. D.

 

Founder, Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots

April 27, 2012

 

THE PROBLEM; The corporations, the 1%, own all the electronic voting machines, and these can all be rigged – optical scan machines that use paper ballots that are then scanned electronically and DRE’s/touchscreen machines that don’t use paper ballots. The 1% are rigging the elections of we the people, the 99%.

EXAMPLES THAT SHOW HACKING CAN BE DONE TO ALL KINDS OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

a) Research by Professor Edward W. Felten, Princeton University, showed that keys from hotel mini-bars, an office furniture store and those bought freely on the Internet, can open Diebold Accu-Vote TS voting machine and leave no trace. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/hotel-minibar-keys-open-diebold-voting-machines.

b) The Vulnerability Assessment Team at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago reported that these same electronic voting machines (as in a) above) and that will be used by 1/4 of voters in 2012 can be hacked, changing voting results and leaving no trace of the tampering – with about $25, by a student with an 8th grade science education, using a remote control device. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220356/Argonne_researchers_hack_Diebold_e_voting_system_

c) Alex Halderman (Univ of Michigan) and Ari Feldman (Princeton), in 3 afternoons, replaced the voting software of the Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen DRE voting machine (used by almost 9 million voters in 2008) with Pac-Man. They did this in three afternoons, without breaking any tamper-evident seals. There is not a word on any plans to give Ms. Pac-Man suffrage, says Kim Zetter of Wired. http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pacman/

d) Finnish computer geek Harri Hursti, – produced by Bev Harris and Black Box Voting – demonstrated (in multiple tests) that you can program a voting machine (Diebold Optical Scan) to do anything to votes, and with a little more work, you can make the fraud undetectable. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hursti_Hack&oldid=404680293 (has links to authoritative pages)

e) The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) issued a warning in December 2011 about ES&S DS200 IntElect optical scan electronic voting machines errors during voting. These machines were used in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and New York. Read more details here and here. Nevertheless, the machines will not be decertified. Said Brian Hancock of the EAC: “Our goal is not to decertify systems. We never want to be in a situation of putting counties in a position where they cannot run an election.”

f) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/01/electronic_voting_hacked_bender/

Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board

g) http://thevotingnews.com/national/internet-voting-systems-too-insecure-researcher-warns-computerworld/

THE SOLUTION IS HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS (HCPB) – i.e. votes must be hand-marked on paper ballots that are HAND-COUNTED TWICE at the polling place, right after the polls close, by opposing parties on the ballots, videographed and livestreamed, and results immediately posted in polling place windows for all to see.