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The November 2006 elections that decided the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and native governments confronted more uncertainty than any election to date. As an alternative of "Democrat or Republican," the extra urgent ques­tion grew to become "correct count or complete debacle?" More than 60 million Americans forged their votes on electronic voting machines for the first time in 2006. Some feared human and machine error, both of which have occurred in almost all electronic voting for the reason that machines were introduced in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, Memory Wave and it's not just conspiracy theorists: For the past three or 4 years, pc scientists have been tampering with voting machines to prove it may be achieved. And they say it's truly pretty simple. With digital voting, the entire setup is electronic, not simply the actual casting of the vote. The voter is given a "sensible card" -- mainly a credit-card-kind device with a microchip in it -- that activates the electronic voting machine.

The voter casts his or her vote by touching a reputation on the screen. If the mannequin contains printout capabilities (which is required by greater than half of U.S. If the printout is right, the voter inserts it into voting machine earlier than leaving the sales space to finish the voting course of. In non-print-out fashions, the voter leaves the sales space after cast his or her vote on the touchscreen. As soon as the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor's smart card into the voting machine and enters a password to entry the tally of all votes on that machine. Election officials both transmit the tallies electronically, through 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 a lot of safeguards in place to make sure no one tampers with the voting machines -- that is an election we're speaking about, in spite of everything.

A few of these safeguards embrace tamper-resistant tape over the machine's memory card slot, a lock over the memory card slot and the machine's battery, and the technique of evaluating the entire votes on the memory card to the number of voters at polling place and to a voting report stored on the machine's exhausting disk (and to physical printouts if available). Machines are password protected and require particular entry playing cards for anyone to get to the Memory Wave memory booster card, Memory Wave and most polling locations conduct background checks of election workers. Lastly, the software on these machines routinely encrypts each vote that is solid. So, where does the problem come in? Consultants level out lots of areas that want enchancment, however as you can most likely tell from the record of safeguards above, the memory card is taken into account to be the weakest level within the system. Princeton University computer-science professor Edward Felton and a couple of his graduate college students acquired themselves one in every of the commonest voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and had their means with it.

They picked the lock blocking entry to the memory card and replaced it with a memory card they'd infected with a virus. The virus altered the votes forged on the machine in a manner that can be undetectable to election officials, because the vote numbers were not solely changed on the memory card, but also in all the backup logs on the machine's hard disk. So the ultimate numbers matched up simply tremendous. One other report, this one by a computer science professor who can also be an election volunteer, states that the safety tape protected the memory card slot seems almost precisely the same after someone removes it after which replaces it -- you have to hold the machine at a certain angle in the sunshine to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Other experts focus on the software that data every vote. It is too simple, they are saying, and never encrypted properly sufficient.