Pixabay
Pixabay
In 2005 a software systems engineer revealed in a report just how easily the results from an election machine can be manipulated.
Harri Hursti, a Finnish hacking expert, was part of a group of engineers brought in by Black Box Voting, a non-profit elections oversight organization, in a successful attempt to hack a voting machine using results from a faux high school election in Florida.
“If one wants to create a false zero report using the methodology previously described, while pre-stuffing the ballot box, there appear to be no safeguards to catch the manipulation,” Hursti wrote in his findings.
The engineers were able to increase the second place finisher’s vote total by over 15 times the actual count, resulting in the second place candidate winning.
An elections official who oversaw the election said it was undetectable and he would have certified it.
Hursti’s findings were later backed up by researchers who were able to duplicate his results in a separate hacking experiment at the University of California Berkeley.
The elections machine arm of Diebold was later sold to Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion’s voting machines have been the source of controversy. In one county, the voting machines have reportedly altered the vote count in the Nov. 3 election.
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