Live from Austin!

The UK recently held an election for Mayor of London. Boris Johnson, a Tory crackpot, got elected. Or did he?

The election was counted electronically. It turns out that monitoring screens mostly showed meaningless data, most observers were unable to observe the votes being counted, the company set up to run the election says the machines were probably counting blank ballots, and nobody has been allowed to audit the software.

But hey, it only cost £4.5 million to get a bunch of numbers that might as well have been made up by some guy in a room somewhere.

Another interesting flaw has been discovered in the Diebold paperless voting machines used in many US states.

The Diebold machines are supposedly secure because they run software from an EPROM, software that has been independently audited and certified for use by election board officials.

Except it turns out that if you change a single jumper inside the machine, it will boot any code you care to supply on a standard flash memory card instead. The jumper switch can be adjustedusing a screwdriver or (better) a pair of needle-nose pliers. Once you’ve booted the machine with your suspect software, simply reset the jumper and remove your memory card. When the machine is turned off, any evidence of tampering will vanish and it will go back to booting from the EPROM.

How ingenious. How…convenient.

The source code for the Diebold touch-screen voting systems being installed in the US was accidentally left on an unprotected FTP server. It turns out that there’s a back door in the code, and it’s trivial to tamper with the results.

Daschle thinks the Democrats lost the elections because they weren’t similar enough to the Republicans, and that they’d do better if they were the party of Iraq wars and tax cuts.