Election fraud a serious threat

The electronic voting systems have long been suspect of being unsafe. One of the most famous recent reports is Ohio secretary of state Jennifer Brunner's EVEREST report (an article, the report). Election fraud is not a wild conspiracy theory but a real threat concerning the electronic voting systems around the US and which hasn't been discussed widely enough.

One of the more famous voting machine hacking experts is Finnish Harri Hursti, who has conducted studies in cooperation with University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University and University of California Santa Barbara. The team of three researchers lead by Hursti conducted a test that yielded frightening results. They managed to change the outcome of the whole election by a virus installed into a single voting machine in a single voting booth.

The group activated the voting machine's infrared gate by a magnet and transferred a virus installed into a palm pilot to the voting system. They could've used a cell phone or a programmable remote control instead also. The virus spread into all the voting machines in the voting area.

After the counting of the votes had started the virus spread into the regional central computer, from there to the state's central computer and from there to the headquarters of Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), the provider of the election system. ES&S is the largest electronic voting system provider in the United States and from their HQ the virus could corrupt voting systems in 36 states. The time that process took was less than two minutes.

That was real and it has been widely described in the EVEREST report mentioned above. Hursti himself said that "it was the most scary hacking that I've ever participated in".

Voting fraud is easy to do and it does not leave any marks. Hursti half-jokingly said that "the scary thing is what we programmers and researchers could do if we snapped and decided to manipulate elections. It's so easy that a large group of people could do it".

There are many other scary scenarios that the researchers have realized in their tests. One good place to study them is Black Box Voting.

Hacking the voting machines is real. It has been done by researchers and it can be done again. Who knows what has actually been done in real elections? When you think about the scandal in Florida in 2000 and then read about voting fraud it really brings some unpleasent thoughts into your mind. Who knows what happened in 2000? The fact is that voting fraud cannot be counted out from the equation.

In "a world's best democracy" like many claim that the United States is these kind of things should not happen. If we can't trust that our votes count then the deep core of democracy is in doubt. The new administration has to do a dramatic overhaul to the voting system because today it's unsafe. And that is not a conspiracy theory.