Marty Kaplan: How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine | The Huffington Post

Marty Kaplan has posted a new Video Pod: How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine

He leaves out a few steps from his explanation, in particular he does not explain what you put on the flash drive but his point is that the machines do not have acceptable physical security. Bruce Schneier has blogged on this incessantly, if he does this much longer he will have have no choice but to start a company making trustworthy voting machines.

I doubt that the security weaknesses have been exploited on any significant scale. There are other more effective ways of fixing an election by preventing voters getting to the polls to vote. Even so expect concern over the security of electronic voting machines to become bi-partisan the minute that the Republican party loses an election.

In the meantime there are ways the problems can be fixed using physical security. Ballot boxes have seals on them, why don't these Diebold machines? drill a small hole through the case so that it goes through the top and bottom parts of the case, put a wire through it and attach a seal. Put the whole machine in a tamperproof metal case. Stick a great big honking siren inside that will go off if there is a tampering attempt. Better yet build the voting booths in such a way that the voters cannot touch the CPU box at all, they only need to interact with the screen.

Better yet employ the technology we use in the UK: its called a pencil.

I don't see what good an audit trail does without a method of verifying the audit trail.