Dutch pull 10% of their voting machines, more to come?

While the US struggles to work out the say, kinks with its own flavor of voting machines, the Dutch just decided to partially chuck some of theirs after the Dutch intelligence service (AIVD) discovered just how vulnerable they are. The 1,187 or so machines to be pulled are all manufactured by Sdu and only make up 10% of the machines used across the Netherlands. Just how insecure are they? Well, the Sdu e-voting machines not only leak radiation like a rogue state, but they also transfer cast ballots with the help of a built-in GPRS modem -- all this makes them easily hackable from up to 30-meters away. The 34 affected municipalities, including Amsterdam, can now install themselves some spankin' new chess playin' voting machines from Nedap which the remaining 90% of the Dutch population will already be bellied-up to during the November 22, general election. Thing is, they too, are currently under intense scrutiny due to their own form of "spurious emissions" amongst other security concerns. Uh, paper and pencil anyone?

[Via The Register]

[Johannes Vinke @ Oct 31st 2006 2:16PM]

It's all over the news here (Netherlands).

They're now concidering the option to have the entire elections done with the good ol' paper & pencil

[Jesse @ Oct 31st 2006 2:27PM]

RTFA engadget.. The vulnerability was not found by the AIVD (they probably have an advantage with such vulnerabilities), it was found out by an actiongroup against unsecure voting machines (can;t describe it in another way sorry)..

[wouterstomp @ Oct 31st 2006 2:46PM]

Amsterdam has already decided it will go for paper & pencil

[Juaquin @ Oct 31st 2006 3:42PM]

I'm still trying to fathom why we need such a complex and insecure system to replace a system that we already know works.

When was the last time pen and paper was hacked?

[Thomas Ricker @ Oct 31st 2006 4:17PM]

Jesse,

You are right, I only meant that AIVD was now aware of the ease of exploiting the vulnerabilities after doing their own tests. They were already made public by the "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" [We Don't Trust Voting Computers] group. I linked to those pieces which we covered previously within this post.

Thomas

[hoberion @ Oct 31st 2006 5:05PM]

also the fact that electronic voting is controlled by private companies in the Netherlands and its closed software.. only a matter of time until someone abuses it.

it also costs about twice as much as pen and paper voting!

[Ben @ Oct 31st 2006 7:44PM]

Juaquin - The last time Paper and Pencil was hacked was when Jeb Bush swindled Florida for his good old pal George W. ;-)

[arcticmaniac @ Oct 31st 2006 8:12PM]

How stupid are govt workers???

All they need is a touch screen voting machine that still allows you to pick candiates and in the end generate a unique barcode that not only registers the votes and has a unique code identifying the voter (without any personal info) so each voter gets one vote and print all this out on a sheet of paper to be read by an offical center in each state. This way there is not only a paper trail for recounts but also prevents hackers from getting into the system since there is no "storage" of any voting information on each machine.Obviously each voter has a chance to verify all the information. And as long as the "paper ballot" is not submitted, corrections can be done. Even if a voter submits two ballots, the final reading would disregard both ballots because there would be 2 ballot for one unique ID.

[Charles R Hamilton @ Oct 31st 2006 9:29PM]

WTF? Karl Rove got to the Dutch too? What an evil Genius that man is. Next thing you know he will be making John effing Kerry screw up his comedy routine about the troops.

[Oswaldo Parra @ Nov 2nd 2006 7:44PM]

Interesting, in Venezuela we vote with LOTTERY MACHINES, even the system was criticized by the government itself because it was impossible to be audited in case of claims by bidders.
The problem isn't the machine itself nor the software, but the lack of trust citizens have about it. There ws reported, but not confirmed that there were made transmissions in hours when voting hadn't ended.
So, who makes the system makes the cheat.