How I would steal an election

[lurky]

11. If they control the hardware, the software, the network, and the servers...

then there are a thousand ways to manipulate the votes. We can try to think of every possible attack and address each one individually, but cheaters will inevitably find another weak spot to exploit. It's just not possible to have confidence in a system like this.

As far as your proposal goes, I think hiding a chip in the machine is pretty unlikely. It would be hard evidence that could be discovered if there were an actual investigation. It would also be very inflexible and expensive to implement, and they would need really smart engineers and a lot of people involved in the design and manufacturing process.

On the other hand, because the voting software is closed-source, it would be embarrassingly easy to hide some logic in it that would make the system do whatever they want when they want. Any decent programmer could hack it together in a weekend. Maybe there is a certain password somebody enters into the machine to switch it from "honest mode" to "evil mode". Who knows. Then after the deed is done they can wipe the drive or re-flash the machine and the smoking gun is gone forever.

Thanks for your post. I'm glad people are still talking about this. Just because Obama won doesn't mean there isn't a problem.