Fergie's Tech Blog

Electronic Voting: Our Hackable Democracy

Andy Greenberg writes on Forbes.com:

Want to be sure that your vote won't be miscounted, redirected or sabotaged in November's election? If you live in New Jersey, Dick Kemmerer suggests you might want to deliver your vote to the county clerk--written on a paper absentee ballot--by hand.

"If I lived in New Jersey and had to choose between a voting machine and walking in a paper ballot," he says, "I'd take paper."

Kemmerer, a professor of computer science at the University of California Santa Barbara, knows too much about New Jersey's alternative: the embattled Sequoia touchscreen voting systems used throughout the state.

Last year, he participated in California's "Top-to-Bottom" review of voting machines that found critical security vulnerabilities in the technologies of electronic voting companies Sequoia, Premier Election Solutions and Hart InterCivic--vulnerabilities that the researchers said could be used to prevent machines from accepting votes, change voting counts and, in some cases, even identify voters.

posted by Fergie @ 10/11/2008 05:37:00 PM