Alternate Title: How to Hack Your Local Election for about $30 and in only 4 Minutes

Note: This post is not intended to be subversive or illegal in any way, shape or form! This information is provided to you so that you can become educated and informed about how unreliable and easily hackable e-Voting elections are. Additionally, once you have been presented with this information it’s your civic duty to DEMAND a 100% physically verified election. Failure to do this will most likely result in an unelected government, a hacked government, that doesn’t care about you or representing your views. If you don’t act NOW, after this election it may very well be too late.

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The November mid-term elections are coming up fast, and Utah has a brand-new, electronic voting system that you’ll have to use to “cast your ballot.” (Maybe your state does, too!)

Ballots

Simply put, counting all those paper ballots by hand is just too darn hard! No, really, that’s the reason the powers that be give for why we don’t use paper ballots.

This leads to an problem inherent in any type of voting: The count is only as accurate as the people (or machines) that are counting. Now, since no party on the ballot wants another party to be counting their votes, there are usually representatives from all parties on hand to participate in and/or supervise the count. This makes sense for a couple reasons: 1) it keeps the people counting honest, and 2) all persons involved in the count then certify their count as being accurate and complete, therefore theoretically ruling out the possibility of embroiled recounts that seem to have no end (anyone remember Florida?).

There has to be a better way to count all those ballots

States have tried punch ballots that can be read by computers to help facilitate the counting of ballots. The idea is that you still have a paper ballot, so it’s still accurate. The problem is with those darn hanging chads (not to mention that they’re apparently too difficult to punch all the way out for voters of one state that juts out into the ocean in the Citrus Belt… But that’s fodder for another rant.

e-Voting

So the logic has been: since computers count the ballots anyway, why not just have the people vote right on the computers? That way we can get rid of all those pesky ballots! And of course they’re accurate (shhh… don’t tell them there’s no paper trail, or any other way to double-check the accuracy of the “ballots” cast).

And then you get all the computer hackers in the world working on cracking them. Some do so with malicious intent.

Just how easy is it to crack one of these new-fangled contraptions?

Watch this video and see how you can hack an e-Voting machine with a $30 USB thumb drive (and adapters) and a #2 Phillips screwdriver in under 4 minutes.

Scared yet?

If that doesn’t scare you, check into these links.