1. Small Vote Manipulations Can Swing Elections By Anthony Di Franco, Andrew Petro, Emmett Shear, and Vladimir Vladimirov October 2004

2. This article talks about the dangers of DREs Polling places all over the US are upgrading from paper ballots to e-voting machines. Some advocates want those machines to become standard. There are growing concerns regarding these devices. That problem is that it has been found out that DREs are easily hacked into and can be modified. They determined that if the machines were modified in that one vote is manipulated from every machine in the US it could be a huge problem. It seems insignificant at first, but multiply that by every machine in the country and you can see how this is a problem. It could possibly alter the outcome of an entire election.

3. Method They worked with a hypothetical version of the 2000 election. They assumed 90% of the votes are from DREs and the remaining 10% from everything else. They worked with data from different states to get an idea of how many machines there were. There were 184,394 voting precincts so they estimated that there were about 572 votes from each place.

4. The results were quite disturbing. They took the five closest-margined states and showed that the margin was less than one half of a percent. Things could of swung to Gore easily. They also found out that even if one vote was changed per machine a difference of twenty-five electoral votes could of gone to either candidate. They also worked with 4 and 8 votes. Gore could of recived 25 to 65 electoral votes. Bush could of recived 30 to 40 electoral votes. One vote per machine could of changed the 2000 Presidential election.Results

5. Conclusion In conclusion there is a potentially huge problem that can arise from these machines. Originally something like this would be impossible with the old system. But with every machine using similar programs, changing them all would now be far easier. A problem like this to a single station would only look like a minor glitch. It’s easily overlooked or just ignored or just be treated as random noise. We need a system that includes voter verifiable ballots and a tally report system that allows for easy recounts by machine and if needed by hand.