Donklephant » Blog Archive » How To Hack Voting Machines…

How To Hack Voting Machines…

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, Technology

You can, and I will show you how on Sequoia Voting Systems, the third-largest voting system vendor in the U.S.

Here is how the “Yellow Button Hack” is done:

1. Go to the back of the voting machine. Press and hold the yellow activate button (about 3 seconds). Release when the screen says “waiting for next voter”.

2. Press and hold the yellow button again until the screen says “change to manual activation?”

3. Touch the “Yes” button on the screen.

4. At that point there will be a message on the screen that says “Manual activate voting enabled” (this is just displayed briefly)

5. Next message will read “Waiting for the next voter” When you see that you touch the message that says “start voting” or “resume voting” located in the lower right of the screen The AVC Edge is now set up for poll worker activation mode.

Here is the sequence:

If it’s regular voting (as opposed to provisional)

a. Once you’ve touched the start or resume the “waiting for next voter” appears

b. Activate the ballot by pressing and releasing the yellow activate button

c. Activate the correct party for the voter AND press the yellow activate button using the keypad on the display screen

d. Select the voter’s language if appropriate

e. Vote. (Once the voter has completed voting and cast their ballot. Prepare the Edge for the next voter. If the next voter is a regular voter repeat step B and D above.

You can now vote as many times as you want to.

So now you know. Go forth and…*sigh*

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 and is filed under Elections, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “How To Hack Voting Machines…”

sanskrit Says:
November 2nd, 2006 at 3:43 pm
would a person have time (or space) to do all that without arousing suspicion? At least, on Election Day?
Justin Gardner Says:
November 2nd, 2006 at 6:17 pm
Depends if they’re in an enclosure or not. Some states still have the curtain. If that’s the case, this should be easy to do. If they only have a couple blinds, then probably not.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

NOTE TO COMMENTERS:

You must ALWAYS fill in the two word CAPTCHA below to submit a comment. And if this is your first time commenting on Donklephant, it will be held in a moderation queue for approval. Please don't resubmit the same comment a couple times. We'll get around to moderating it soon enough.

Also, sometimes even if you've commented before, it may still get placed in a moderation queue and/or sent to the spam folder. If it's just in moderation queue, it'll be published, but it may be deleted if it lands in the spam folder. My apologies if this happens but there are some keywords that push it into the spam folder.

One last note, we will not tolerate comments that disparage people based on age, sex, handicap, race, color, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry. We reserve the right to delete these comments and ban the people who make them from ever commenting here again.

Thanks for understanding and have a pleasurable commenting experience.