A couple of untrained 54-year old women from Black Box Voting bought $12 worth of tools and in four minutes penetrated the memory card seals, removed, replaced the memory card, and sealed it all up again without leaving a trace.
The Experiment on an actual Diebold voting machine shows that the seals do nothing whatever to protect against access by insiders after testing, and the seals also are worthless in jurisdictions like Washington, Florida, California, and many other locations where voting machines are sent home with poll workers for days before the election.
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Several observations can be made:
* This flaw is serious, is not hypothtical, and has been known for over a year.
* Vendors and voting officials have not rushed to fix this, and instead continue to allow Voting Machine "sleep-overs" in which machines are taken home by individuals prior to elections.
* While this particular problem might be addressed by new tags and hardening the armoring, this will happen only in hindsight, and reluctanly, by Diebold.
The last point is perhaps the most telling. These systems do not appear to have been designed with security in mind. And perhaps worse, when the obvious potential for card swaping became clear to the vendor their quicky-fix was a half measure of the metal modesty panel supported on some conveniently placed bolt heads. Indeed the fact that one can still take the lid off with four screws, and access anything and everything, let alone the vital data cartridge, shows how little concern has been placed on security even now. The obstancy of vendors and some public officials to even acknowleging these simple hacks should make any reasonable person wonder about what else might be wrong and certainly to not take assurances of due dilligence on faith.
If the even the most outwardly obvious hardware security is so cavalier, what lurks in the secret software?
