Adam sez, "Ed Felten of Princeton University followed the news coming out of NJ during the recent (non-presidential) primaries. Some of the Sequoia machines couldn't handle a name containing a 'n' with a tilde, but more surprising of all, voting machines were left unattended overnight in schools and churches all around Princeton, NJ. — Read the rest

Last night's edition of Dan Rather Reports (on HDNet) presented "conclusive evidence of the failure of touch screen voting machines across the country." Link to "The Trouble With Touchscreens," and Link to episode on Google Video.

Adam Aviv says:

Prof. Matt Bishop of UC Davis, author of An Introduction to Computer Security, describes his recent work of hacking the California voting machines for the California Department of State on "Talk of the Nation Science Friday" on NPR.

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. — Read the rest

BoingBoing reader Sejin says,

In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website. The working keys were confirmed by Princeton scientists, the same people who discovered that a simple virus hack on the Diebold machines could steal an election.

BB reader Doran says,

The Miami Herald is reporting numerous problems (they call it "a handful of glitches") with voting machines which are registering votes for Democrats as votes for the Republican. The story cites several examples. In one the voter requested help from a poll worker, but even then it took three tries to get the machine to record the vote properly.

The key that controls access to a standard Diebold voting machine is a common key that can be ordered from the Internet, also used to open hotel minibars.

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine – the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus – can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet…

Using such a standard key doesn't provide much security, but it does allow Diebold to assert that their design uses a lock and key.

Diebold's voting machines are even less secure than previously suspected. Inspection of a Diebold machine by the open Voting Foundation revealed that all it takes to get a Diebold machine to boot a modified, crooked operating system is the flip of a switch, a task that can be accomplished in a brief moment using nothing but a screwdriver. — Read the rest

Diebold's notoriously insecure voting machines — in use across the USA — have been found to have an even deeper vulnerability than previously known. A new report by Harri Hursti, released on BlackBoxVoting, documents how an attacker with a few moments' of private physical access to a machine could compromise it and load it with his own software, compromising every function of the machine, including the ability to count votes. — Read the rest

Black Box Voting has released its stats from its investigation of the electronic voting machines used in 2004 in Palm Beach County, Florida: they found over 100,000 anomalies in the logs:

The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night…

Dozens of voting machines were turned off during the middle of the election while the polls were open.

The governor of California turned out to vote and discovered that the electronic voting machines thought that he'd already voted, so he had to cast his provisional ballot. Remember last year when EFF was representing the kids from Swarthmore College who were being sued by Diebold, makers of electronic voting machines? — Read the rest

Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director (whose landmark Bernstein case legalized crypto), sez,

Feel like your democracy is a bit opaque these days? Beginning tomorrow, EFF will help shed a little light in two interconnected ways. On Thursday and Friday, June 9th and 10th, EFF will provide a series of weblog reports of a two-day lobbying effort by a coalition of activist groups fighting for transparent, auditable electronic voting.

Over 4,500 votes vanished in one North Carolina county due to a data storage error. Whoops! Democracy buffer overrun.

Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state. Local officials said UniLect, the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

BoingBoing reader Joe says:

A computer glitch in a Columbus, Ohio precinct gives Bush an extra 3,893 votes. Makes you wonder what other mistakes the computer made that we haven't found.

I'm a computer programmer and quality assurance tester for a software company in Cleveland, so I know a thing or two about computer glitches.

David Weinberger sez, "From BlackBoxVoting, evidence that machines were hacked in an election 6 weeks and a recommendation from Bev Harris that voting officials unplug the modems NOW."

New information indicates that hackers may be targeting the central computers counting our votes tomorrow.

If you're a Sims player you can download this "Dumboold" electronic voting machine, which has almost as many flaws as the real thing from our malfeasant friends at Diebold!

The Diebold Voting Machine is programmed with cheats, bugs and easter eggs, which you can discover and read about by playing around with it.

Diebold's voting machines have a stunning security defect:

Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created.

On the eve of the first Indian election run with electronic-voting machines, a technologist called "smz" has posted an in-depth comparison between Diebold's voting machines and the ones in use in India.

The System is a set of two devices running on 6V batteries.

Douglas sez, "A group of us recently got our hands on unedited videos of the meetings where Texas's appointed voting system examiners meet with vendors. Very scary stuff. We've put together a downloadable 'greatest hits' version. My favorite moment: 'I just want to make sure this machine can add. — Read the rest

Remember last week when EFF asked IEEE members to write to their organization to get it to rein in a broken standards process that was threatening to unleash corruptable voting-machines onto unsuspecting democracies?

Well, we won! After all the hue and cry over the problems with the proposed standard, the committee has voted no-confidence in the proposal, sending electronic voting-machines back to the drawing board. — Read the rest