DUH...

About frickin' time. As an engineer who has reviewed software and hardware designs for literally hundreds of embedded systems, I was astounded by the virtually non-existent scrutiny given to E-Voting machines. Fer crissakes, software for a toilet retention tank monitoring system gets a far more thorough review than a Diebold 'Vote-O-Matic' (or whatever the hell they call it). Given the rush to market and the "quick, sprinkle it with holy water" approval process, such systems were bound to be buggy and riddled with security holes, even without someone putting them there on purpose.

A Single Person Could Swing an Election

To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It's the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines.

Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams's conspirators thought, "How easily can we manipulate the election results?"

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

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