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The electronic voting system selected by Maryland and several other states may harbor serious software flaws that could allow voters or poll workers to tinker with election results, a team of Johns Hopkins University computer security experts has reported.
The touch-screen voting machines made by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems are vulnerable to subversions ranging from multiple voting to vote switching, the Hopkins study concluded. It said some hacks could be accomplished with little expertise, using inexpensive, widely available equipment.
"It's very, very scary," said Aviel Rubin, technical director of Hopkins' Information Security Institute and one of the report's authors. "This is something that is the cornerstone of our democracy. I believe as a society we're moving too fast toward electronic voting."
In a carefully worded statement, Diebold defended the system and said its machines were certified by federal, state and local officials. It said the code the Hopkins researchers tested appears to be outdated and criticized the researchers for not contacting them during the analysis. But the company said it would "reserve judgment on the researchers' fundamental conclusions."
Full story at Baltimore Sun