Are Diebold Voting Machines Hackable?

Posted on May 15, 2006

A new evaluation has found critical security issued with the Diebold TSx. The PDF document of the report written by Harri Hursti on BlackBoxVoting says someone with private access to one of the Diebold electronic voting terminals could load their own vote altering software on the machine. Ed Felten and Avi Rubin at Freedom to Tinker have posted a brief summary of what the report says. The Diebold systems could potentially be used to miscount votes.

Hursti's findings suggest the possibililty of other attacks, not described in his report, that are even more worrisome.
In addition, compromised machines would be very difficult to detect or to repair. The normal procedure for installing software updates on the machines could not be trusted, because malicious code could cause that procedure to report success, without actually installing any updates. A technician who tried to update the machine's software would be misled into thinking the update had been installed, when it actually had not.
On election day, malicious software could refuse to function, or it could silently miscount votes.

One of the main concerns raised in the 2004 elections was that there should be a way to provide a paper trail in the form of a paper print-out (or receipt) in case there was tampering with one of the Diebold machines. However, most U.S. states using the Diebold machines did not give voters a print out.