Small Vote Manipulations Can Swing Elections

1
Small Vote Manipulations Can Swing Elections
By Anthony Di Franco, Andrew Petro, Emmett Shear,
and Vladimir Vladimirov October 2004
2

• This article talks about the dangers of DREs
• Polling places all over the US are upgrading from
  paper ballots to e-voting machines.
• Some advocates want those machines to become
  standard.
• There are growing concerns regarding these
  devices.
• That problem is that it has been found out that
  DREs are easily hacked into and can be modified.
• They determined that if the machines were
  modified in that one vote is manipulated from
  every machine in the US it could be a huge
  problem.
• It seems insignificant at first, but multiply
  that by every machine in the country and you can
  see how this is a problem.
• It could possibly alter the outcome of an entire
  election.

3
Method

• They worked with a hypothetical version of the
  2000 election.
• They assumed 90 of the votes are from DREs and
  the remaining 10 from everything else.
• They worked with data from different states to
  get an idea of how many machines there were.
• There were 184,394 voting precincts so they
  estimated that there were about 572 votes from
  each place.

4
Results

• The results were quite disturbing.
• They took the five closest-margined states and
  showed that the margin was less than one half of
  a percent.
• Things could of swung to Gore easily.
• They also found out that even if one vote was
  changed per machine a difference of twenty-five
  electoral votes could of gone to either
  candidate.
• They also worked with 4 and 8 votes.
• Gore could of recived 25 to 65 electoral votes.
• Bush could of recived 30 to 40 electoral votes.
• One vote per machine could of changed the 2000
  Presidential election.

5
Conclusion

• In conclusion there is a potentially huge problem
  that can arise from these machines.
• Originally something like this would be
  impossible with the old system.
• But with every machine using similar programs,
  changing them all would now be far easier.
• A problem like this to a single station would
  only look like a minor glitch.
• Its easily overlooked or just ignored or just be
  treated as random noise.
• We need a system that includes voter verifiable
  ballots and a tally report system that allows for
  easy recounts by machine and if needed by hand.