Well, I voted today. A few impressions.

1. There seemed to be a lot of polling locations around my apartment, and a lot of machines. No lines when I showed up (at 3). If you DOSed one machine I think it would have little effect on the outcome unless a race was very close.

2. You can't get access to the machines unless you are registered to vote in the district in question. This means that you would either have to attack your own district or you would need to be able to effectively fake the identity of someone in the district of choice while preventing them from showing up before or during your visit.

3. Old people can easily distract poll workers with stupid questions.

4. Swaping the smart cards would have been dead easy. If the system could be attacked with a bad smartcard, then you could get away with this, and you would have at least 10 minutes to play around on the console without drawing any attention.

5. You're not in an enclosed booth, so putting a sniffer inline between the smart card and the reader might get noticed. You'd have to be pretty slick to hide it. Maybe drop your copy of the league of women voter's guide on top of the reader once the card is inserted. Also, the card snaps into place in the reader. That mechanism might interfere with any custom hardware, but it depends.

6. The smart card reader is attached to the machine with a plainly visible rs232 cable. If you were really slick you might be able to place a device inline between the reader and the cable, but you might get noticed, and certainly such a device would be discovered later.

7. You could probably Van-Ek phreak polling places. I don't think anyone has discussed that. I was happy to see that in Georgia they enter you registration on a scantron form. In Tennessee they used a computer, which seemed to be network conected. I figured one might be able to associate votes with people because of that.

8. If Diebold could devise a way to make the machine start beeping in the event that one of the critical processes crashed or the administrative modes were accessed this would be a somewhat effective security mechanism. Any attack would depend on a lot of slight of hand under the noses of other people. Things that make loud noises tend to draw attention. Obviously this could never be fool proof.

9. The UI was nice. I had some trouble getting the touch screen to recognize some of my presses, but all in all it was a good voting experience.

This article details one particularly instructive case from the Vietnam era.

The Man in the Snow White Cell

Jacobson has posted a followup to her story in which she begins to sound like Bill O'Reilly. You can forget about this story. I can't think of her as credible at all after reading the paragraphs I quote here.

] The fact that I quoted Ann Coulter seems to have many people up in arms.  I want
] to be clear -- there is no political agenda here.  I quoted Ann Coulter
] for the information she had, not for who she is.  Read the quote again
] and pretend Joe or Jane Doe wrote it.  She states the facts. The facts she states
] are that 10 days after 9/11, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta sternly
] reminded airlines that it was illegal to discriminate against passengers based on
] their race, color, national or ethnic origin or religion.
]
] Perhaps the title of Michael Smerconish's new book sums it up: "Flying Blind. How
] Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety Post 9/11."

Part II: Terror in the Skies, Again? - Yeah, it was bullshit

] Befitting the clashes around the design, the Freedom Tower
] itself is now in doubt: it might not reach its symbolic
] height and, if it does, it will probably do so with the
] help of antennae. Likewise the centrepiece memorial is
] being designed by Michael Arad, who won the commission in
] a contest, and it will not be sunk into the ground, part
] of Libeskind's plan that had been praised by Pataki.

Yuck.

Freedom tower design in doubt

] "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional
] right to vote for electors for the President of the
] United States," the court said, "unless and until the
] state legislature chooses a statewide election as the
] means to implement its power to appoint members of the
] Electoral College."

Usurping the Voters (washingtonpost.com)

] A BILL to amend Chapter 5 of Title 21 of the Official
] Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to elections, so as
] to... establish a voter information commission...

Apparently this didn't pass.

GGA - HB 326 - Elections; publicly financed campaigns; voter information commission

] One of the most commonly used tools for voter education
] is the voter information pamphlet. These pamphlets
] provide a great deal of information about ballot
] issues-and sometimes about candidates, as well. Voters
] may peruse the pamphlet at their leisure, and may even
] take it with them into the voting booth. Clearly, voter
] information pamphlets are a worthy voter education
] effort.

A summary of which states have official voter information pamphlets and how much some states spend on them. In most cases under a million a year.

Voter Information Pamphlets

The League of Women Voters put out this brief candidate guide. This is best example of non-partisan candidate information I've found so far, and while I'm glad this exists, I think its pretty sad that more information is not available.

I was thinking this morning that I don't really like the changes that have taken place in order to reform campaign finance. I think we're curtailed the freedom of speech. If I support a candidate then I ought to be able to say it, and I ought to be able to say it with a great big billboard if I so desire. This is America. I also think we've seriously violated people's personal privacy. I can find out what campaigns my employees and business partners have donated money to!! This is extremely dangerous and widespread abuse is only a matter of time.

What have we gained from this? Is the present election less corrupt then previous ones? I hardly think so. I haven't heard any explanation of that. I'm still walking into local elections knowing nothing about many of the races. Knowing none of the candidates.

There is a lot of bad speech in our democracy. A lot of signs on street corners that do not reveal anything about a candidate's competence, their voting record, their goals, even their party affiliation. A lot of our democracy goes directly to those who can generate the best name recognition by having the biggest marketing budget and simplest message.

But in my experience the answer to bad speech has always been more speech.

In California a booklet similar to the one the League of Women Voters put together here is put together by the government. Each candidate gets a least a page to state his or her case. Every office and referenda item is covered. You spend an hour looking it over and you walk into the ballot office knowing something about who you are voting for. Sure, people ignore them, chuck them in the trash, but at least its available. At least everyone gets a chance to tell you who they are, regardless of their budget. In Georgia its very hard to find out what all the races are and whose in them even if you really want the information. An uninformed Democracy is not a democracy at all.

Georgia Voter's Guide

] Many races will be decided either on July 20 or in the
] Aug. 10 primary runoffs. Nearly all contests for judges'
] seats, for instance, will be determined on the 20th,
] despite that their elections are supposedly nonpartisan.

Tomorrow is an election day in Georgia.

Creative Loafing Atlanta | NEWS & VIEWS | PRIMARY CRIB SHEET

] A HANDFUL of Web users are programming their own virtual TV
] newscasts and eclectic collections of video clips using a
] free media-sharing tool called Webjay (www.webjay.org).
] The site makes it easy to build, share and watch
] playlists of audio and video links culled from around the
] Internet.

Interesting....

The New York Times - Multimedia Scrapbooks to Share