Law Technology

Unattended Voting Machines, As Usual

By Ed Felten

It’s election day, so tradition dictates that I publish some photos of myself with unattended voting machines.

To recap: It’s well known that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering, if an attacker can get physical access to a machine before the election. Most of the vendors, and a few election officials, claim that this isn’t a problem because the machines are well guarded so that no would-be attacker can get to them. Which would be mildly reassuring — if it were true.

Here’s me with two unattended voting machines, taken on Sunday evening in a Princeton polling place:

Here are four more unattended voting machines, taken on Monday evening in another Princeton polling place.

I stood conspicuously next to this second set of machines for fifteen minutes, and saw nobody.

In both cases I had ample opportunity to tamper with the machines — but of course I did not.

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Full post as published by Freedom to Tinker on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).