hackers ruin everything

1. People clearly seem to be unhappy with the state of electronic voting methods, and for good reasons. The Diebold machines, which are widely used in American elections, seem to have been built with little thought as to the possibility of being hacked. There are in fact two separate ways that a Diebold machine can be hacked. First, in the documentary Hacking Democracy they displayed how the Diebold machines can be tampered with through the easily accessible memory cards. They show that most machines can easily be taken apart with a screwdriver or similar tool, and access to the memory card is obtainable to anyone with motor skills. To skew the votes, you simply need to write a program to your replacement card and slip it in place of the Diebold card. When the receipts for the precinct are printed out, the results do not show any signs of being tampered with. Thus this form of hacking is the most basic, yet the most effective, and least detectable. The second form of hacking the Diebold machines are highly vulnerable to involves the program that it uses to count the votes. The program, "GEM", is easily hackable in minutes even without the correct codes, and they proved in the documentary that you do not even need a password to access the program files. With this type of hacking, however, there is a chance that the altered program would print out a different receipt than the result. Therefore this method is slightly more susceptible to suspicion.

2. This whole dilemma seems to be causing a lot of issues, and I don't quite understand why we cannot create some kind of solution to all this hacking. For one, if I was in charge of changing our current election process, I would either find another company other than Diebold to manufacture voting machines, or demand that Diebold make their machines with a more secure system of storing voter data. I would recommend that they devise a system where, rather than having individual memory cards in each machine, they make a seperate unit, similar to a server or large external hard drive, that would store the voter data, and could only be accessed by cleared voting officials. For the hacking problems with GEM, I would sugest several things. First, I think the interface of the Diebold machines allows users to interact with the GEM software too much. Voters should at no point have access to administrtive areas that require passwords. Beyond this, any administrative procedures that may need to be accessed via the machine should be done in an alternate fashion from the way a normal voter can access the machine. If this cannot be achieved with the GEM program, I would propose to have another program developed that eliminates any public access to adminstrative material or data.