Want Your Candidate to Win? Hack the Machine!

Yeah, its Presidential Election Time again. It's only 11 days away and McCain seems to be loosing speed.

But, if you really want him to win, have the possibility of getting on CNN, being sent to jail and potentially invalidating at least your entire states votes you can hack the voting machine. Engadget has thoughtfuly provided the link to the Princeton website which describes how to hack the Sequoia Machines. Of course, if you've been following the controversy of the past few years the competitor of Sequoia, Diebold, has machines that are equaly easy to hack.

What does all this mean? In under five minutes (or the average time it takes someone to vote) you can hack the machine you voted at, with the potential of spreading the chaos to at least every other machine in your voting precinct, and have the candidate of your choice win. I will warn you though, if you're caught you will go to jail for a very long time.

So, for those of you too chicken to get arrested physically stopping people you don't want to vote from voting you can now do it remotely. (Just make sure to calibrate the machines so you aren't casting more votes than actual voters, you know, unlike in 2004).

Anyway, I thought I should alert everyone to this possibility and state that I support a papertrail and manual checking of every-single electronic vote cast. And, by this I don't mean the machine printing out a vote which is then checked by a physical piece of paper filled out by the voter which is then checked against the electronic record.

It is apparent that, like Microsoft's problem in China, this has the potential to be a catastrophe. It is incomprehensible to me that we should let companies that aren't very good are writting good software safeguard our national emblem, a free electoral process involving secret ballots. We need to do something about this now, not after some election somewhere is stolen.