Voting Machines

This is from the F-Secure Anti-Virus lab’s weblog:

USA votes

Posted by Mikko @ 08:11 GMT

USA votes for their next president today.

For the first time in history, a major part of this voting is done on voting machines running on top of a general-purpose operating system.

The three largest manufacturers of voting systems (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia) all run closed-source systems on top of Windows. You would think that voting machines would be a prime example of systems that should be open source, so anybody could verify what exactly happens and how. And there is a long list of known failures so far.

We might also remember that Diebold is one of the largest manufacturers of Windows-based ATMs…and that RPC and LSASS -based network worms have managed to infect such cash machines in several occasions over the last year and a half.

So it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.

FallingDog

November 2, 2004

Yes, it certainly will be. Fortunately, I live in a town where the average age is 87, so we had the Scantron ballots. I got to fill in circles! I felt as if I were taking the ACT again.

Alter Idem

I live in a swing state with mail-in ballots only. There’s confidence for ya. Of course I vote in a state with punch cards. I voted with a paperclip. What an odd process, now that I think about it too much. Even ignoring the electoral college.