How safe are electronic voting machines ?

The US electoral system is rapidly moving towards increased usage of electronic voting machines. In a bit of news which is certainly not going to be very comforting, a researcher has managed to buy 5 voting machines from a Government auction site. He is now embarking on a project to reverse-engineer these machines to determine their security levels.

At one level, he found that the security is pretty low. The ones that he bought came with keys that allowed him full access to the hardware and software (the guts of the machine). But even if he did not have keys, one of his students had managed to pick the lock in 7 seconds. One fundamental question - why would any county be auctioning electoral voting machines ?

If he does find out the code can be tampered easily and in such a way that it does not flag any alarms, then the situation would be very risky. Tampering with one machine would not impact any election; but tamper with a number of machines that are not stored with fool-proof security could swing close elections. This is a very serious matter in terms of its implications. But is anybody seized of the matter ?

Read the detailed article here.