Stealing the vote

Here's one more proof that electronic voting machines are bringing an end to our democracy:

Working directly with a Diebold AccuVote TS touch-screen voting system, the computer scientists have been able to implant a nearly-undetectable virus onto a touch-screen voting system, managing to successfully alter a voter's ballot — after it's already been confirmed and cast — in order to flip the vote so that it is recorded for a candidate other than the one the voter had intended.

According to the study's team leader, Edward W. Felten, a professor at Princeton's Department of Computer Science, the report confirms – and records in a video-taped demonstration – that such a malicious virus could be easily inserted onto a Diebold touch-screen voting system by a single individual "with just one or two minutes of unsupervised access to either the voting machine or the memory card" used with the system to store ballot definitions and vote tabulations.

The virus, as programmed by the Princeton team, could then spread from one voting system to the next depending on the way the machine in use is configured, or the way in which votes are tabulated in any particular jurisdication.

See a video demonstration of election theft here. What's really insidious about this is that all you have to do is hack one machine. Then, the tainted software spreads to other machines whenever someone plugs a new memory card into the machine, removes it, and puts it in another machine. Pretty soon, a whole population of machines becomes tainted.