The dumbest thing a voting-machine maker ever did

<Hacking a voting machine usually involves getting inside and swapping out a chip or two, so you would think they would make them really hard to open up. Sure enough, it you look at a Diebold (now called Premier Election Solutions) AccuVote-TS machine, there's a locked cover keeping everything secure. The only problem is that even election officials lose their keys occasionally, so Diebold sells new ones to "Diebold account holders" through their online store.

Now this is where it gets really dumb. Right there on the order page is a picture of the keys (since removed), showing exactly what they look like. Dumber still, it turns out that every AccuVote-TS machine uses the exact same key, and dumbest of all, it's essentially the same as many of the keys used for hotel mini bars and office file cabinets. A group studying voting machine security at Princeton University found that with three blank keys, a file, and a small vice, they could easily make two working keys by copying the key pattern from the Diebold website.>

http://dvice.com/archives/2008/10/voting_machines.php

Updates at Brad Blog: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4066

Sort of depends on what they're really trying to accomplish, doesn't it?

disputatiously,
Bright

Actually wasn't my words!

And that can be a wireless connection as well.

The key is mostly to make you look at something other than the stupidity of computerized voting as opposed to the less egregious computerized counting.

:D