5:31 PM - Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2004
How To Hack A Voting Machine
Class is now in session.
BEV HARRIS AND HOWARD DEAN HACK THE VOTE IN 90 SECONDS TO ILLUSTRATE HOW CHENEY ROVE BUSH DID IT
Dean: All right, Bev, show me how to do this.
Harris: Well, What we have here is the central tabulator computer. Now in a voting system you have all these different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in one county.
All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So of course if you were going to do something you shouldn't, to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to the 4000 machines or to just come in here to one machine and deal with all of them at once?
What surprises people is the central tabulator is just a PC. It's like you and I use, it uses Windows, it's just a regular computer.
Dean: So anybody who can hack into a PC, can hack into the central tabulator.
Harris: The GEMS program is the program that is the central tabulator program. And I'm going to put in a password here. OK, we're in. Now this is the official program that the county supervisor sees.
Dean: Is this the Diebold program?
NEO:In case I didn't warn you all..
Here is an OLDER reminder.
Harris: Yes, this is a Diebold central tabulation program.
Dean: OK.
Harris: And then go to 'Election Summary Report', It's gonna-- we're in spin for a minute, while it adds up all the votes from all the different precincts.
And as we can see here, Howard Dean has a thousand votes, and Lex Luther (sic) has 500 so you're beating Lex Luther and we're--
Dean [gleefully]: --Two to one!--
Harris: --Yes, and Tiger Woods unfortunately doesn't have any votes yet.
Dean: All right.
Harris: All right, let's close this out. I was just showing you the legitimate way to go in and look at votes, which of course--
Dean: --All right--
Harris: --you can't tamper with.
Go to the Start Menu, and I'm going to show you something tricky. And I want you to go to 'My Computer' and just click that, and you're going to see something come up, go to...
Harris: ...'Local Disc C:' and go to 'Program Files'. And on Program Files we're going to go to 'GEMS', which is the name of the Diebold program...
We're going to go to 'LocalDB', which stands for 'Local Database, that's where they keep the votes. And by the way, this has been out on the Internet for ages now.
Harris: Go to 'Central Tabulator Votes', which is the database we just looked at...
...and then go to the 'Sum of the Candidates', which is that table.
Harris: You see we have 800 votes here for you, and 400 for Lex Luthor-- Let's just flip those. We'll make that 400... and we'll give a hundred votes to Tiger.
Harris: Let's just see what happened here. We'll go back into GEMS the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor, you're checking on the progress of your election, and as you can see now, Howard Dean only has 500 votes, Lex Luther has 900 and Tiger Woods has 100 votes.
Dean: Hm.
Harris: We just edited an election, it took us 90 seconds.
nEo
"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe
whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland
and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
