An interview with with the professor of computer science at Rice who is researching security of electronic voting machines.

Charles Kuffner at Kuff's World:

I'm talking today with Dan Wallach, professor of computer science at Rice University, who's been doing a lot of research on the effect and security of electronic voting machines. Dan, as you know, there was recently a study done by some Princeton professors about the Diebold voting machines and how one could compromise them and change or affect the votes that are recorded on them. Could you tell me a little more about that and kind of give me a bottom line as to how concerned people who use those machines should be about them?

Dan Wallach: So what the Princeton study did was they were able to get themselves an actual Diebold voting system--basically the same as the ones that are used in Maryland and Georgia and several other states--and what they figured out was that when poll workers are operating Diebold voting systems, there are memory cards that they move around to collect the results at the end of the day. And what they found was that they could actually create a virus that would spread from one machine to the next by virtue of that memory card moving around. This is analogous to the days before the Internet, when viruses could spread on floppies from one computer to another, and they basically figured out they could do that with Diebold voting systems. And the reason why that's significant is that you only need to infect one machine. So you compromise one machine, and then that infection can spread throughout the entire county.

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