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February 20, 2007, 12:58 PM ET
Computer Scientist Takes E-Voting Apart
A Princeton computer scientist said Uncle Sam taught him how easy it can be to hack on the cheap.
Professor and electronic-voting critic Andrew Appel spent only $82 to buy five $5,000 Sequoia electronic voting machines from a government auction Web site last month, according to Wired News. It didn’t take long, he said, for him and his students to find security holes in the AVC Advantage machines — one student picked the lock in only 7 seconds, gaining access to the machine’s motherboard and memory chip.
A Sequoia spokeswoman said Mr. Appel exaggerated the machines’ vulnerability and that they were designed to alert headquarters if manipulated. But Mr. Appel suggested that would-be manipulators were capable of anticipating and disabling alarms. —Sierra Millman
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