When you walk into your voting booth, be very concerned if you see the voting machine pictured here. It is the AccuVote-TS model from Diebold.

Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy has published a non-partisan report disclosing security vulnerabilities researchers have detected in this voting machine.

Main findings from Princeton University’s Voting Machine Security Analysis include:

1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold’s software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines’ hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

Here is a short video illustrating Diebold’s shortcomings:

Once again, this problem has reared it’s ugly head. The fear is that it may be too late for this election season in many areas. Hopefully, yours isn’t one of them.