Indian voting machines 'hacked' by U.S. scientists
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 20 May 2010, 23:11 IST   |    60 Comments
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Indian voting machines 'hacked' by U.S. scientists
London: Although the Indian election officials consider that their electronic voting machines are foolproof, and would be very difficult to tamper with, American scientists say they have developed a technique to hack into Indian electronic voting machines. After connecting a home-made device to a voting machine, University of Michigan researchers were able to change results by sending text messages from a mobile. "We made an imitation display board that looks almost exactly like the real display in the machines. But underneath some of the components of the board, we hide a microprocessor and a Bluetooth radio," Prof. J Alex Halderman, who led the project, told the BBC. He also added, "Our lookalike display board intercepts the vote totals that the machine is trying to display and replaces them with dishonest totals - basically whatever the bad guy wants to show up at the end of the election." However, India's Deputy Election Commissioner, Alok Shukla, said, "It is not just the machine, but the overall administrative safeguards which we use that make it absolutely impossible for anybody to open the machine. India uses about 1.4m electronic voting machines in each general election. "Before the elections take place, the machine is set in the presence of the candidates and their representatives. These people are allowed to put their seal on the machine, and nobody can open the machine without breaking the seals."

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