STUDY: ONE PERSON COULD HACK AN ELECTRONIC ELECTION COUNT

ZACHARY A. GOLDFARB, WASHINGTON POST - To determine what it would take
to hack a U.S. election, a team of cyber security experts turned to a
fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional
gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It's the year
2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines. Jefferson was
forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the
vote. Adams's conspirators thought, "How easily can we manipulate the
election results?"

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a
report that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated
technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the
voting machines, to change the outcome.. . . The report concluded that
the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant
security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of
these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records
to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of
votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.

http://tinyurl.com/oudom