How to Hack the Vote and Steal the Election

divisionbyzero writes "Many people have asked for it so that the government will have to deal with it. So here it is: a guide to stealing an election that uses electronic voting machines written by Jon Stokes over at Arstechnica. From the article: "In all this time, I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it's time to hit the panic button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.""

Comments

Email this story to your representative

[nuzak]

Go IMMEDIATELY to http://www.house.gov/writerep/ and send them an email/contact form entitled "How to Steal an Election", with the URL http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ar s in the body. Vary the title if you prefer (I'm open to suggestions), and please do add something in your own words about how much the unaccountability and lack of transparency concerns you.

Repeat this process for http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/ senators_cfm.cfm (the Senate's small enough that they just list them all on one page)

After about a thousand folks do this, a staffer might actually go print out the story and hand it to their congresscritter in a brief.

I'd also like to ask the Ars Technica people to make an exception for this story and make the PDF available to non-subscribers, as it would really help to disseminate this story to the right people. I'm not really sure how to go about contacting them.

Here's my letter (slightly munged of course by slashdot):

I recently came across "How to Steal an Election" at http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ar s which lays out in rather devastating detail how flawed the current system of electronic voting is. I am concerned that our election process has effectively been privatized by a small number of companies, some of which are overtly partisan in their politics, and none held accountable for the numerous and easily-exploitable security flaws in their equipment. One of the equipment companies in particular has taken to smear campaigns and litigation against its critics in an attempt to silence them.

I understand that voting should and must be accessible to the disabled, but this can be done without compromising the security and integrity of our elections. Slot machines in Nevada are subjected to extremely rigorous design standards for security, while voting machines have no such standards at all. This situation cannot go on -- I urge you to secure our elections with appropriate legislation.

[signature stuff removed]

You can buy them from Diebold

[caffeine_monkey]

Unbelieveably, Diebold actually has an ecommerce site where you can buy all their electronic voting machine products online, including memory cards, security tape, and access keys. I'm really hoping they verify that you're an elections official before they actually ship the stuff to you:

http://www.diebold.com/nasadmk/cgi-bin/desi_cata log.pl?section=9

Here you go - buy a dozen keys, for you and your friends:

http://www.diebold.com/nasadmk/cgi-bin/desi_cata log.pl?section=9&id=163

On a funny/sad note, the front page of their election products site as a glaring coding error (%=rs("newsdate")%):

http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/