AccuVote

A misnomer if there ever was one.

I've read enough to believe that the 2000 as well as the 2004 elections were stolen (Florida and Ohio, respectively especially). Also there are midterm election questions as well. People - like Secretaries of State who are in position to purge voting rolls - have been one aspect - voting machines are another (voter suppression is also a component and unreliable voting machines adds to that). If our media was worth anything - this would be the main story until it was solved.

Princeton University came out with a study recently - it mostly confirms the problems with voting machines that we already knew about. See video here.

The main findings of our study are:

Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.

While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.
___

Update - a new article about this - Will The Next Election Be Hacked? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.