Thank you Santorum, Because We Just Won Virginia Buddy!

Seriously?

To steal elections of course.

It's much easier than stuffing ballots or punching chads, or dumping ballots in the trash, locking them in a safe, taking them to your house. You might get caught.

But with paperless electronic systems, it's cinch.

You don't even need to hack any particular machines, though that is certainly possible. But again, you'll likely get caught.

No, you see the way to steal elections now is with what is termed the "central tabulator."

Essentially, in some form or another, cartridge, disk, tape, etc., the digital copy of the votes from each machine is sealed up and transmitted to someone in charge of elections to certify them.

They plug in this portable medium, and the data gets dumped to the computer they are on.

Here's the kicker. We don't know how many, but certainly SOME systems use a simple spreadsheet for this. An UNPROTECTED ONE that is NOT "read only."

Read that one again if you don't get it.

The person operating the "central tabulator" computer, can simply edit the vote right there with the cartridge from the machine plugged in and the vote is forever altered with NO way to get the original back. If they are clever enough, they can even change the timestamp on the file so it looks like they never did anything to it. (though being an unprotected file, it will automatically have its "modified" stamp changed anyway, so there's no way to know if it was just read, or in fact modified)

Some say, "but there are reports printed at the polling place sometimes even signed that can verify the original count."

True, but those are in the hands of the central tabulator as well.

All they need is a single machine, plug the edited cartridge back in, reprint the report, and transfer the signatures. (easy for anyone who can forge documents)

To some, this sounds too far fetched. But the reality, is there now is a very small "need to know" circle that has unfettered access to alter the vote. The real totals are never reported, only the made up ones.

If we had paper receipts, and those were part of the verification process, then we'd turn these machines into glorified calculators and printers. They'd still serve a purpose - faster vote counting and more accurate counting and verification. (no handwriting, no chads, no pencil marks, etc.) But it would be pretty damned hard to steal the election if you do it right. (3 carbon copy receipt, two of which must verify to count a vote)

As well, if you wanted to cover your bases better, you could simply put a hack on the storage medium.

This has been shown to be effective already on some systems.

The cartridge is inserted into the machine. The "zero" report is run. And it comes out zero as expected. But as the votes are counted, a program on the cartridge intercepts and alters the votes and then writes them. All that is needed is to input the offset of votes for a particular race.

For example, say you want candidate A to win.

Then you give candidate B an offset of say -30 votes for that machine. (or more, depending on the precinct and the likely turnout) Then as people vote, it will take 31 real votes for Candidate B to actually get a single recorded vote. If not enough people voted for B to prevent a negative count, a simple algorithm can choose a number to record that is less than Candidate A, or maybe even the real vote itself since it happens to be so low.

You could technically, even pre-program in the final vote tally you want. That way, people vote, the machine thinks it is writing them to the storage device, but the device is simply putting them elsewhere and/or deleting them. When you print the "results" they are of course not the true vote. And NO ONE save whomever programmed the cartridge and who ordered it, would know or need to know. (and most likely not want to know unless they were a regular voter)

Not saying they will actually do it... but hoping the campaign is doing and others are doing all they can to ensure a fair election on all state elections. All most of us can do is phone bank and make sure to come out in full force when it's to vote. :)