Professor Teaches Children to Vote Drunkenly

Computer science professor Edward Felten wants drunken kids to tabulate the votes in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Today, Felten, who has been a long-standing critic of electronic voting machines that lack a paper trail and who has persistently pointed out flaws in Diebold's security practices, drops the news that nearly any old key will open the machines.

For instance, a hotel mini-bar key will do the trick.

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine ø the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus ø can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence ø until we learned how common these keys are.

Chrisøs key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. Itøs a standard part, and like most standard parts itøs easily purchased on the Internet.

So now kids will know that you can buy hotel mini-bar keys on the intertubes and for kicks, will go count votes.

As for me, I couldn't be bothered to pull such a stunt, since deciding which little bottle I should get into is way more interesting than deciding which platitude to vote for in November. Photo: wanderingone