Play Chess on your nearest e-voting machine
Summary: IT Professionals have hacked one of the voting machines which is used to collect votes in elections for several European countries. The machine was originally purchased by the Irish government for their elections, but were not used after the Irish Government had doubts about the legitimacy of the results. Not only did the professionals at Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet (“We Dont Trust Voting Computers”) publicly document how to alter these voting machines to produce desired results, they also reflashed a machine to play chess.
Reason: Obviously there is a big ethical issue here. In the computer world, data is always modifiable, even if it’s not supposed to be - just look at copy protection on media. However, is a paper voting system going to solve this? There are advantages to both methods - paper voting takes much longer to tally, but there is concrete proof of the vote that took place. Computer voting gives the results immediately, but brings up debacles like this one. Computers will never be completely safe from hacking, so we either have to put our faith in a computer system that will eventually be broken, or revert to paper voting.
Credibility: This article was posted on The Register, a large news site for IT professionals.
Thursday, October 5, 2006
