Master Diebold Key Copied From Web Site

Harrington writes "In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website. " Update: 02/06 17:40 GMT by Z : We previously discussed this story, early last year.

Bad move

[Z00L00K]

First it's a bad move to post the actual key on the website. Maybe it works on their ATM:s too?

Second, from the appearance of the key it seems to be a lock that's EXTREMELY easy to pick so the effort to make a copy - even by trial and error - would be small.

So if everybody that knows that Diebold machines are in use during an election makes their own key and just unlocks it and leaves the machine open... That could be for some interesting news. Votes dismissed due to irregularities - 50%. Just make sure that the machines is in the counties populated mostly by your opponent.

And - what stops one from ordering keys from Diebold?

Re:Spreading Democracy Begins at Home

[mi]

But instead, this story will become a footnote. Precisely because there's an election going on. An election that is threatened by these untrustworthy machines.

Although, indeed, appalling, the threat is overblown. AFAIU, it would still require someone to visit each machine in person in order to affect its results. This simply is not enough to sway the overall results of an important election.

Even if the "swingiest" district of the "swingiest" State is attacked via this exploit, the "winner" would still need to really win in a great many other places. This happened before. For example, in 1960 [adversity.net]:

[...]

• Fannin County, Texas had only 4,895 registered voters. BUT 6,138 votes were cast, 75% of which went to Kennedy.
• Angelina County, Texas: In one precinct, only 86 people voted yet the final tally was 147 for Kennedy, 24 for Nixon.
• [...] found a cemetary in one Chicago precinct where the names on the head stones were registered voters who had actually voted!
• [...] visited the Chicago address where 56 Kennedy voters listed their address. What he found was an abandoned, demolished house.

It did affect the outcome, but only because Nixon's real win was razor-thin to begin with... Unless a truly major force (like a foreign government [cnn.com]) is financing the nation-wide hacking, the "razor-thin" is still a required quality. And a major force will, likely, find it easier to spend its money and efforts via (largely) legal covert and overt media-campaigning, rather than the highly illegal hacking.

I wish such fraud was completely gone, but that may be impossible. Whether Diebold-machines make the situation worse is not immediately obvious...