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German hackers fight electronic voting

It'll end in tears, warns Chaos

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Veteran German hacking group the Chaos Computer Club is fighting the use of electronic voting machines in upcoming local elections.

A lawsuit filed by the group against the German state of Hesse seeks a temporary injunction against the use of electronic voting machines that would prevent their use in 27 January local elections. The legal action contends that NEDAP voting computers due to be used in the count in eight districts are insecure and "susceptible to manipulation".

"Recourse to the court has become necessary since the Hesse state government evidently does not have the required expert knowledge to understand the technical security and transparency flaws of the voting machines, nor the will to act accordingly," the Chaos Computer Club explains.

Additional security measures added by the Hesse Ministry of the Interior to address concerns about the integrity of votes tallied using NEDAP voting computers are insufficient, the hackers argue. 45,000 people have signed its petition to reject e-voting machines.

Chaos Computer Club's legal offensive follows a successful attempt by Dutch hackers in banning the same type of NEDAP voting machines in the Netherlands. A Dutch judge last year ruled the use of 9,000 Nedap e-voting machines in recent Dutch elections unlawful because of a lack of adequate authorisation. Results compiled using the machine were, however, allowed to stand. The decision was hailed as a victory for the Dutch "we don't trust voting computers" foundation. ®

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Latest Comments

Fight EVM's every inch of the way!

It's your duty as inhabitants of democratic countries to ensure democracy keeps its name clean and is seen to be trustworthy and open if we're trying to 'implement democracy' in countries we visit (hem hem). How could anyone possibly have any faith in any system with no paper/audit trail? Even the hard and software is non-reviewed code, and having seen the quality of the code companies rustle up for sale when they know the code isn't going to be reviewed, I have nothing but expectation of massive fraud being possible-to-inevitable.

On my voting slip, I mark an X. If that X is rubbed out or tampered with then it 1) is highly visible and 2) done in the presence of counters, invigilators, etc and damn hard to get away with.

On an evoting slip, a 0 changes to a 1. A tiny current, too small for me to detect temporarily affects the value at a memory location, and is eventually written to a (spinning rust!) hard drive - so many opportunities for failure, but nobody will ever be aware of them.

Can you prove this machine vote was rigged? No - Can you prove it wasn't?

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we should fight it too

especially when the voting machine in Mahoning County recorded negative 25 million votes for John Kerry. Unless you have a paper trail you cannot have a recount.

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Anonymous Coward

@Greg

If they're anything like the US voting machines, then yes, they will be. Unencrypted Access databases, actually.

And the admin password is "1111"

And the disks get left in unsupervised parking lots, in unlocked cars.

And they're all manufactured by huge donors to political parties who are dedicated to world domination.

Cheers!

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