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The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting
Morgan Road Books
September 2006
288 pages ISBN: 0767922107 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Political
Democracy has never been more vulnerable. The problem
is right here in America.
How to Sabotage an
Election
Become an election judge and carry a
refrigerator magnet in your pocket
Program every
fifth vote to automatically record for your
candidate
Bury your hacked code
Avi Rubin, a
computer scientist at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in
systems security knows something the rest of us don’t. Maybe
we suspected it, maybe we’ve thought it, but we didn’t have
proof.
Until now.
The electronic voting
machines being used in 37 states are vulnerable to
tampering, and because the manufacturers are not required to
reveal—even to the government—how they operate, voters will
never know if their votes are recorded accurately.
Follow Rubin on his quest to wake America up to the
fact that the irregularities in the 2004 elections might not
have been accidents; that there are simple solutions that
election commissions are willfully ignoring; that if you
voted on an electronic machine, there’s a chance you didn’t
vote the way you wanted to.
Learn what you can do
the next time you vote to make sure that your vote is
counted. Imagine for a moment that you live in a
country where nobody is sure how most of the votes are
counted, and there’s no reliable record for performing a
recount. Imagine that machines count the votes, but nobody
knows how they work. Now imagine if somebody found out that
the machines were vulnerable to attack, but the agencies
that operate them won’t take the steps to make them safe. If
you live in America, you don’t need to imagine anything.
This is the reality of electronic voting in our
country.
Avi Rubin is a computer scientist at Johns
Hopkins University and a specialist in systems security. He
and a team of researchers studied the code that operates the
machines now used in 37 states and discovered the following
terrifying facts:
The companies hired to test the
election equipment for federal certification did not study
the code that operates the machines and the election
commissions employed no computer security
analysts.
All votes are recorded on a single
removable card similar to the one in a digital camera. There
is no way to determine if the card or the code that operates
the machine has been tampered with.
It’s very easy
to program a machine to change votes. There’s no way to
determine if that has happened.
There were enough
irregularities with the electronic voting machines used
throughout the 2004 election to make anyone think twice
about using them again.
Avi Rubin has testified
at Congressional hearings trying to alert the government
that it has put our democracy at risk by relying so heavily
on voting machines without taking the proper precautions. As
he has waged this battle, he has been attacked, undermined,
and defamed by a prominent manufacturer. His job has been
threatened, but he won’t give up until every citizen
understands that at this moment, our democracy hangs in the
balance.
There are simple solutions and, before you
vote in the next election, Rubin wants you to know your
rights. If you don’t know them and you use an electronic
voting machine, you may not be voting at all.
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