By John Vibes
Did you know that for just $26 and an 8th-grade education you can hack a voting machine? This has actually been common knowledge for years, since a study at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois developed a hack to manipulate voting machines just before the 2012 elections.
The researchers who developed the hack were actually able to hijack a Diebold Accuvote TS electronic voting machine, one of the most popular voting systems at the time.
Two of the lead researchers in the study were able to demonstrate a number of different ways that voting machines could be hacked. They used a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8, along with a $15 remote control.
They demonstrated that the cheap hack worked from over a half-mile away.
“When the voter hits the ‘vote now’ button to register his votes, we can blank the screen and then go back and vote differently and the voter will be unaware that this has happened. Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock, you don’t have to have state-of-the-art security, but you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in,” Johnson said.
As far as how easy the hack is, Johnson told Popsci that “I’ve been to high school science fairs where the kids had more sophisticated microprocessor projects.”
Watch the documentary Hacking Democracy for an in-depth look at the flawed voting machines the U.S. uses in the electoral process.
Even if your vote is actually counted (it probably isn’t), it still won’t matter who wins in the end, anyway—they are all going to carry out the exact same policies with just slightly different rhetoric behind them. It should be obvious by now that this system is not only inherently corrupt, but also failing miserably and in the midst of collapse.
John Vibes writes for TheAntiMedia.org. Tune in! Anti-Media Radio airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: Ciudadania Digital. Help us fix our typos: [email protected].
“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.” – H. L. Mencken
Democraps working hard to win all future elections
The Help America Vote Act that brought computer voting machines to all the states was brought to us courtesy of the Bush Administration. Do not be fooled by the red-blue meme. One party — the corporate party — controls both the Democrats and the Republicans. That is why Congress hasn’t written a piece of legislation that benefits the people in over fifteen years, and corporations are raking in huge profits. Keeping the people divided and hating each other is the plan so that we don’t look up and notice who is pulling both sets of strings.
Oh no. They keep a very close 50 50 relationship on purpose so they can waddle the line losing and winning as needed to advance the elite agenda and continue the con job of the two parties pretending to lose and win to keep the people passive and fooled.
Maybe this is why Obama was so sure he was going to be reelected in 2012. There never seemed to be any doubt in his mind that he was going to do a second term.
This doesn’t even address the other way votes can be tampered with. When punched cards are generated by a “voting machine” (older technology?) and the cards are sent to a central computer for counting at the end of election day, the counting program could have been written to change votes only under certain conditions. It is a conditional action – very familiar to even beginning programming students.
That still doesn’t help the low budget candidate who would have to pay for the re-count. The solution is hand marked and hand counted ballots. They should be counted at the precinct after closing and again at the central location the ballots are taken to. It actually doesn’t take much longer to count than computerized voting with punched cards.