President Nader or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love DREs
President Nader
or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love DREs
Introduction
While not an exhaustive treatment, the point of this writing is to explain how a person or group of people with little knowledge of the inside workings of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines could influence the outcome of the 2004 President Election. This writing is based on the following assumptions:
It is not necessary to do this in a manner that is undetectable. It is acceptable — even if it is less desireable — to allow investigators to discover that manipulation has occurred, provided it is impossible for them to undo the damage.
The budget for this endeavor is limited, perhaps only tens of thousands of dollars. Given that the average campaign ad commercial costs millions of dollars, the ability to throw an election for a fraction of this cost is attractive.
The target for manipulation is any county or precinct that uses DRE machines; such DRE machines use a touchscreen interface, store votes on PCMCIA devices and system devices (such as hard drives and non-volitile memory). These machines report to a local central tabulation computer in the precinct, which then modems the totals to the county seat. Poll workers take the PCMCIA cards to the county seat to correlate the totals with the modemed results.
The attackers have a detailed understanding of Microsoft Windows, telephone networks, and are competent programmers.
The DRE machines and the underlying OS are certified; this implies a six-month lag between the “blessed” version you know will be running on election day and any security holes that may have been discovered since certification.
[…continued at URL below…]
http://www.cs.duke.edu/~justin/voting/PrezNader.html
