The November 2006 elections that determined the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and native governments faced more uncertainty than any election to date. As an alternative of "Democrat or Republican," the more pressing ques­tion turned "accurate rely or complete debacle?" Greater than 60 million Americans forged their votes on electronic voting machines for the primary time in 2006. Some feared human and Memory Wave Protocol machine error, each of which have occurred in virtually all digital voting for the reason that machines had been launched in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it is not simply conspiracy theorists: For the previous three or 4 years, pc scientists have been tampering with voting machines to show it may be performed. And they say it's actually fairly easy. With electronic voting, your entire setup is digital, not simply the precise casting of the vote. The voter is given a "good card" -- basically a credit score-card-kind device with a microchip in it -- that activates the electronic voting machine.

The voter casts his or her vote by touching a name on the display. If the mannequin contains printout capabilities (which is required by more than half of U.S. If the printout is appropriate, the voter inserts it into voting machine before leaving the booth to finish the voting course of. In non-print-out models, the voter leaves the booth after forged his or her vote on the touchscreen. Once the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor's sensible card into the voting machine and enters a password to entry the tally of all votes on that machine. Election officials either 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 numerous safeguards in place to verify nobody tampers with the voting machines -- that is an election we're talking about, in spite of everything.

A few of these safeguards embody tamper-resistant tape over the machine's memory card slot, a lock over the memory card slot and the machine's battery, and the process of comparing the full votes on the memory card to the number of voters at polling place and to a voting record saved on the machine's exhausting disk (and to bodily printouts if available). Machines are password protected and require particular access playing cards for anyone to get to the memory card, Memory Wave and most polling locations conduct background checks of election workers. Lastly, the software on these machines mechanically encrypts each vote that is cast. So, where does the issue are available? Experts point out numerous areas that need enchancment, but as you'll be able to in all probability tell from the listing of safeguards above, the memory card is considered to be the weakest level in the system. Princeton University laptop-science professor Edward Felton and a few his graduate students bought themselves one among the most common voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and had their manner with it.

They picked the lock blocking access to the Memory Wave Protocol card and Memory Wave replaced it with a memory card they had contaminated with a virus. The virus altered the votes solid on the machine in a method that would be undetectable to election officials, as a result of the vote numbers weren't solely modified on the memory card, but also in the entire backup logs on the machine's arduous disk. So the ultimate numbers matched up simply wonderful. One other report, this one by a computer science professor who can be an election volunteer, states that the safety tape protected the memory card slot seems nearly exactly the same after someone removes it and then replaces it -- you've got to hold the machine at a certain angle in the light to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Different specialists focus on the software program that data every vote. It's too simple, they are saying, and never encrypted nicely enough.