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[glynor]

Normally I'd stop and be sure to adjust my tinfoil hat before reporting on something like this.  Not this time.  This time its real and its going to happen.

What if I told you that it would take only one person — one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company's internal computer network — to steal a statewide election?

Any of you who are concerned about democracy remaining a viable system of government (and that should really be all of you) should really take a few minutes to read (at least skim) this article on Ars Technica. It's titled (as the subject of this email is): "How To Steal An Election By Hacking The Vote".

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

Its less of a primer than a warning, though it is certainly a dire warning.  I'll leave you with a few more quotes from the article, just to wet your appetite...

You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that's only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn't want to believe me, and I don't blame you.

The GEMS database stores all of the votes collected from precinct accumulators, and it's used to do the vote tabulation for a county. Because it's so sensitive, you might think it would be tightly secured. But you'd be wrong.

The GEMS database is a vanilla, unencrypted Microsoft Access database that anyone with a copy of Access can edit. So if you have physical access to the GEMS server's filesystem (either locally or remotely), then it's not too hard to just go in and have your way with the vote totals. If Access isn't installed on a particular GEMS server, just install it from a CD-ROM, or connect remotely from a laptop and edit the database that way.

My own personal fear is that, by the time a whistleblower comes forth with an indisputable smoking gun—hard evidence that a large election has been stolen electronically—we will have lost control of our electoral process to the point where we will be powerless to enact meaningful change. The clock is ticking on this issue, because a party that can use these techniques to gain control of the government can also use them to maintain control in perpetuity.

[BartMan01]

Politicians have been rigging/stealing elections at the state level for as long as I have been alive.  Didn't need a computerized system to do it either, but this may make it easier/cheaper to do.

[glynor]

Politicians have been rigging/stealing elections at the state level for as long as I have been alive.  Didn't need a computerized system to do it either, but this may make it easier/cheaper to do.

True, but this is very different.  Those types of fraud are what's known as "Retail Fraud".  They generally require large numbers of people who are all aware of what's going on.  It also generally leaves a trail of evidence (the voters know they've been intimidated, the ballot stuffing leaves paper records, etc, etc) that can be followed to find the perpetrators eventually, if only in the history books.

These new systems allow Wholesale fraud (changing the results of the election in one fell swoop) that can be done by a single person, who needs not have a large amount of money, influence, or know-how in order to accomplish it.  Plus, if you read the article, the vast majority of these methods would be completely undetectable after the fact.  There is literally no way to determine that the frauds ever occurred!!

[hit_ny]

Hacking the vote : AKA targeting the swing voters..

..well tried tactic used by both parties successfully in the previous elections.

[BartMan01]

These new systems allow Wholesale fraud (changing the results of the election in one fell swoop) that can be done by a single person, who needs not have a large amount of money, influence, or know-how in order to accomplish it.  Plus, if you read the article, the vast majority of these methods would be completely undetectable after the fact.  There is literally no way to determine that the frauds ever occurred!!

If this is actually true (not doubting you, and taking the source at face value) then it shows gross incompetence of the firms that designed the systems and (not surprising) the politicians that put them in place.  It should be possible to build a system with proper safeguards in place (assuming that the intent to subvert is not coming from the designers or actually part of the spec).