$100 or so a pop. Here’s a nice up-to-date Diebold machine. And here’s a stack of the voter access cards that go with them. Brian Varner reports on how much can be learned from such items.
The hard drives had not been wiped. The information I found on the drives, including candidates, precincts, and the number of votes cast on the machine, were not encrypted. Worse, the “Property Of” government labels were still attached, meaning someone had sold government property filled with voter information and location data online, at a low cost, with no consequences. It would be the equivalent of buying a surplus police car with the logos still on it.
Even current models are shot through with comically obvious vulnerabilities–exposed USB ports, insecure smart card readers, operating systems that haven’t been updated in 5 years–that aren’t present in, say, ATMs made by the same companies. Sadly, the circles in the venn diagram marked “people with the power to fix this” and “people who want to fix this” do not overlap.