The November 2006 elections that determined the make-up of the U.S. Congress and state and native governments faced more uncertainty than any election to this point. As a substitute of "Democrat or Republican," the more pressing ques­tion became "correct depend or complete debacle?" Greater than 60 million People cast their votes on digital voting machines for the first time in 2006. Some feared human and machine error, each of which have occurred in almost all electronic voting because the machines were launched in restricted scope in 2002. Others feared a darker foe, and it is not simply conspiracy theorists: Memory Wave For the previous three or 4 years, computer scientists have been tampering with voting machines to prove it may be finished. And they say it's really pretty easy. With electronic voting, your entire setup is digital, not simply the precise casting of the vote. The voter is given a "sensible card" -- basically a credit score-card-kind device with a microchip in it -- that activates the electronic voting machine.

The voter casts his or her vote by touching a reputation on the screen. If the model includes printout capabilities (which is required by more than half of U.S. If the printout is correct, the voter inserts it into voting machine before leaving the sales space to finish the voting course of. In non-print-out fashions, Memory Wave the voter leaves the booth after cast his or her vote on the touchscreen. As soon as the polling place has closed, an election official inserts a supervisor's sensible card into the voting machine and enters a password to entry the tally of all votes on that machine. Election officials either transmit the tallies electronically, via a network connection, Memory Wave System to a central location for the county, or else carry the memory card by hand to the central location. ­Election officials point out that there are various safeguards in place to ensure nobody tampers with the voting machines -- that is an election we're speaking about, after all.

A few of these safeguards embody tamper-resistant tape over the machine's memory card slot, a lock over the memory card slot and the machine's battery, and the means of comparing the entire votes on the memory card to the number of voters at polling place and to a voting document stored on the machine's laborious disk (and to bodily printouts if out there). Machines are password protected and require special access cards for anybody to get to the memory card, and most polling locations conduct background checks of election employees. Finally, the software on these machines mechanically encrypts every vote that is cast. So, where does the issue come in? Specialists level out lots of areas that need enchancment, however as you possibly can in all probability inform from the listing of safeguards above, the memory card is considered to be the weakest level in the system. Princeton College pc-science professor Edward Felton and a couple of his graduate college students received themselves one in all the commonest voting machines -- a Diebold AccuVote-TS -- and had their way with it.

They picked the lock blocking entry to the Memory Wave System card and changed it with a memory card they had infected with a virus. The virus altered the votes cast on the machine in a approach that would be undetectable to election officials, as a result of the vote numbers were not solely changed on the memory card, but also in the entire backup logs on the machine's onerous disk. So the final numbers matched up just tremendous. Another report, this one by a computer science professor who is also an election volunteer, states that the security tape protected the memory card slot appears nearly precisely the same after someone removes it after which replaces it -- you've to carry the machine at a certain angle in the light to see the "VOID" imprint that arises after tampering. Different experts deal with the software program that records each vote. It is too easy, they say, and never encrypted properly sufficient.