How to Stop Voting Machine Fraud

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

If your precinct only offers computerized voting machines the chance that your vote will be hijacked goes up dramatically. Prof. Edward Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton, conducted a study recently that found that it would not be at all difficult to hack into a Diebold machine that is the most commonly used electronic voting machine in the country.

Professor Felten's two main findings were:

(1) Malicious software on a voting machine can "steal votes with little if any risk of detection." It can also "modify all of the records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss."

(2) "Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install" malicious software in as little as one minute.

Today, 27 states - including such large ones as California, New York, Illinois and Ohio - require electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper trail. There is paper-trail legislation pending in a dozen more states. This realistic solution is still years away.

In the mean time, while you hammer your state's elected officials for voter-verified paper trails, you can and should request an absentee ballot. In many states you can deliver the ballot to your Division of Elections in person. It's up to each of us to make sure that our votes aren't stolen. If our candidate loses fair and square, so be it. If our candidate loses because of big money-no ethics-political machines then we have to fight back.

More information:

VerifiedVotingFoundation.org

BlackBoxVoting.org

WheresThePaper.org