Princeton’s Andrew Appel writes on Freedom to Tinker about an illegal cover-up of New Jersey e-voting irregularities. The Princeton team have done amazing technical and investigative work on electronic voting machines, and Appel’s piece (the first of three) demonstrates exactly the sort of dangers that e-voting critics have long warned of.
1 New Jersey court-ordered election-security measures have not been effectively implemented.
2 There is a reason to believe that New Jersey election officials have destroyed evidence in a pending court case, perhaps to cover up the noncompliance with these measures or to cover up irregularities in this election. There is enough evidence of a cover-up that a Superior Court judge has referred the matter to the State prosecutor’s office.
3 Like any DRE voting machine, the AVC Advantage is vulnerable to software-based vote stealing by replacing the internal vote-counting firmware. That kind of fraud probably did not occur in this case. But even without replacing the internal firmware, the AVC Advantage voting machine is vulnerable to the accidental or deliberate swapping of vote-totals between candidates. It is clear that the machine misreported votes in this election, and both technical and procedural safeguards proved ineffective to fully correct the error.