Election hacking

[rhu]

When I went to vote yesterday, I noticed a sheet of paper labeled "AccuVote Locking Page" on a table behind the AccuVote machine. Curious, I Googled it, and it appears that when the polling worker is ready to lock the machine down at the end of business on Election Day, they are supposed to scan this sheet as though it were a ballot, while holding down two buttons on the control panel. (It's not clear from these instructions whether or not a key is required to access the buttons, but even if so, the key is a standard part.

The locking page itself can be purchased online for about $3. And of course the polling place provides "privacy sleeves" so no one can see your ballot.

So, here's my nightmare scenario: There's a close election, and a bunch of people each go to one polling place in districts that tend to vote in a particular way, early in the day. Under their arm each has a newspaper, within which is concealed a copy of the locking page. They claim to be a voter from the precinct (I have never been asked for ID when voting in Mass. -- or else you just recruit a legit voter in each precinct) and take a privacy sleeve. While "filling out" their ballot in the privacy carrel, they swap the ballot for the locking page, and then when depositing the ballot they lean against the machine, concealing that they are using their left hand to depress the buttons while feeding their "ballot" into the machine. I have no idea how much noise the machine would make when being locked down --- does it beep? Does the printer start? But our culprit is already making for the door.... And now the machine is locked, and the election workers have no way of processing the hundreds or thousands of people who are going to show up for the rest of the day. "Best" case, that whole precinct is unable to vote at all; "worst" case some people are told to come back later and don't....

Comments

Not so plausible

[jikamens.livejournal.com]

Outright, detectable election fraud of this sort is a non-starter, because it would invalidate the election and require a revote.

I imagine that there are procedures in place for how a polling place recovers and allows people to vote if their AccuVote stops working, and that these procedures would be put into effect in this scenario.

The worst-case scenario, it seems to me, is that the election workers would collect the votes uncounted and feed them through the machine later. A small number of votes would end up being uncounted because they weren't filled in properly and the voters were long gone by the time this was detected, but that wouldn't be nearly as bad as the "best" and "worst" case scenarios you suggest.

Isn't one of the whole points of paper ballots that they can be registered and collected even without a working machine?