More on Diebold

This is a slightly older story, but it further illustrates the inherent flaws with closed-source electronic voting machines.

In his Wednesday evening keynote address on Security at SD Best Practices, Boston, Cigital's Gary McGraw discussed a paper and shared clips from a video demo released today by Edward Felten, Ari Feldman, and Alex Halderman of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, titled: Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine. The paper details a simple method whereby the Princeton team was able to compromise the physical security of a Diebold voting machine, infecting it with a virus that could change voting results and spread by memory-card to other machines of the same type.

The reality of the threat posed by closed-source voting machines is such that, effectively, we no longer have a Republic. Instead, we have a government chosen by the proprietors of the voting machines, or any group interested in changing the outcome of an election. Or, rather, we have a government chosen based on trusting that absolutely no one in the vast group of people with the power to tamper with these machines will want to influence the election. What a stupid thing in which to place your trust - you're guaranteed to get burned in the long run.