The November 2006 elections that decided the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and native governments confronted extra uncertainty than any election to date. As an alternative of "Democrat or Republican," the extra pressing ques­tion became "correct count or complete debacle?" More than 60 million People cast their votes on electronic voting machines for the primary time in 2006. Some feared human and machine error, each of which have occurred in virtually all electronic voting because the machines were introduced in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it is not simply conspiracy theorists: For the previous three or 4 years, computer scientists have been tampering with voting machines to prove it may be performed. And MemoryWave Guide they say it's actually pretty simple. With electronic voting, your entire setup is electronic, MemoryWave Guide not just the precise casting of the vote. The voter is given a "sensible card" -- principally a credit-card-type gadget with a microchip in it -- that activates the digital voting machine.

The voter casts his or her vote by touching a name on the display. If the model includes printout capabilities (which is required by more than half of U.S. If the printout is right, the voter inserts it into voting machine earlier than leaving the booth to finish the voting process. In non-print-out models, the voter leaves the booth after cast his or her vote on the touchscreen. As soon as the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor's smart card into the voting machine and enters a password to entry the tally of all votes on that machine. Election officials both transmit the tallies electronically, by way of a community connection, to a central location for the county, or else carry the memory card by hand to the central location. ­Election officials point out that there are lots of safeguards in place to ensure no one tampers with the voting machines -- that is an election we're talking about, after all.

A few of those safeguards include tamper-resistant tape over the machine's memory card slot, a lock over the memory card slot and the machine's battery, and the strategy of comparing the whole votes on the memory card to the variety of voters at polling place and to a voting report stored on the machine's exhausting disk (and to physical printouts if accessible). Machines are password protected and require particular entry playing cards for anyone to get to the memory card, and most polling places conduct background checks of election employees. Lastly, the software on these machines robotically encrypts each vote that's forged. So, the place does the issue come in? Specialists level out lots of areas that need improvement, but as you can most likely tell from the listing of safeguards above, the memory card is taken into account to be the weakest point within the system. Princeton College computer-science professor Edward Felton and a few his graduate students bought themselves certainly one of the commonest voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and had their method with it.

They picked the lock blocking entry to the memory card and replaced it with a memory card they'd infected with a virus. The virus altered the votes solid on the machine in a method that would be undetectable to election officials, because the vote numbers were not solely changed on the memory card, but also in the entire backup logs on the machine's laborious disk. So the final numbers matched up just nice. One other report, this one by a pc science professor who is also an election volunteer, states that the safety tape protected the memory card slot appears almost exactly the identical after someone removes it after which replaces it -- you've gotten to hold the machine at a sure angle in the sunshine to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Different consultants concentrate on the software program that records each vote. It is too simple, they say, and not encrypted properly enough.