Evoting researchers buy used "secure" voting machines for $82

Princeton e-voting researchers bought a sooper-seekr1t voting machine at a government auction for $82, and they're now busily dissecting them to find all the ways that they can be coaxed into eating your vote. Voting machine scammers vendors say that their machines are totally secure, but also say that they can't tell anyone how they work.

For a mere $82 a computer scientist and electronic voting critic managed to purchase five $5,000 Sequoia electronic voting machines over the internet last month from a government auction site. And now he's taking them apart.

Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel and his students have begun reverse-engineering the software embedded in the machines' ROM chips to determine if it has any security holes. But Appel says the ease with which he and his students opened the machines and removed the chips already demonstrates that the voting machines are vulnerable to unauthorized modification…

Despite the ease in doing this, Appel said the Sequoia machines he bought so far seem to be more secure than a Diebold voting machine that Princeton colleague Ed Felten and others examined last year. Felton discovered that he could inject subversive software into the Diebold machine through the removable memory cards on which it stores votes. He could even produce a virus that would spread automatically from one Diebold machine to another.

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