Report: ES&S Voting Machines Can Be Maliciously Calibrated to Favor Specific Candidates By Kim Zetter November 03, 2008
Touchscreen voting machines at the center of recent vote-flipping
reports can be easily and maliciously recalibrated in the field to
favor one candidate in a race, according to a report prepared by
computer scientists for the state of Ohio.
At issue are touchscreen machines manufactured by ES&S, 97,000 of
which are in use in 20 states, including counties in the crucial swing
states of Ohio and Colorado. The process for calibrating the
touchscreens allows poll workers or someone else to manipulate specific
regions of the screen, so that a touch in one region is registered in
another. Someone attempting to rig an election could thus arrange for
votes for one candidate to be mapped to the opponent.
"If one candidate has a check box in one place and a different
candidate has it in a different place, you can set it up so that if you
press on one candidate it gets recorded for another candidate," said
Matt Blaze, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who
led one of three teams that co-wrote the report
(.pdf) last year. "But if you press on the other candidate, it gets
recorded correctly for that candidate. You can make it work perfectly
normally in most of the screen, but have it behave the way you want in
small parts of it."
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