Politics

Tamper-Proof Electronic Voting Unlikely

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published August 10, 2009 at 1:09 PM PDT

This story was published more than 15 years ago.

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have devised a software program that once again challenges assumptions that electronic voting machines can be made secure.

Computer Science Professor Hovav Shacham says it’s possible to reprogram electronic voting machines by scrambling the existing software. He likens it to cutting up newspaper headlines to create ransom notes.

This is important, Shacham said, because proponents of touch screen voting machines assume a hacker would need to introduce new code to tamper with results.

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"This assumption is actually untrue," Shacham said, "an attacker can simply slice and dice parts of existing programming to construct any behavior that he wants, without ever introducing any new code."

Working with researchers at Princeton and Michigan Universities, the team used so-called “return oriented programming,” to tamper with voting machines used in North Carolina.

California currently restricts touch screen voting machines to one per polling place, and requires a paper trail to audit results.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.