"Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines are not secure enough to
guarantee a trustworthy election, and an attacker with access to a single
machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an election using viruses,
according to a review of Diebold's source code.
'The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes,' read the University of
California at Berkeley report, commissioned by the California Secretary of State
as part of a two-month 'top-to-bottom' review of electronic voting systems
certified for use in California."
The fear on everyone mind is that of a person or group who would use this to take advantage of the system and manipulate a win for their candidate. While that is a scary prospect, we should also consider what a terrorist could do if they were intent on disrupting the system. In some ways this is the scariest idea, because at least there is some constructive logic to manipulating for one person versus another. What if a terrorist could break into the system and erase the election results so that whole segments of the population just lost their votes all together. We need to know that our voting system is more secure than that. A paper trail would not stop someone who was set not on changing the election, but destroying it.
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