E-voting machine plays college fight song

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 12:09

The city of Washington, D.C. challenged hackers to try to break into one of their secure Internet-based electronic voting system. It was part of a test for the software before deploying it in the city--letting D.C. voters skip going to the polls and voting online instead. Well, students from the University of Michigan hacked into the system and re-programmed the software to play the Michigan fight song after each vote.

The online voting project has been suspended. The online system was intended to make it easier to submit absentee ballots. Security experts had warned the city that the system would be vulnerable to attacks, and so it was. We have a perfectly good paper ballot and mechanical ballot system that is extremely resistant to internal manipulation. Making it "more convenient" to vote by introducing vulnerable systems is not progress.