Diebold, the much beleaguered maker of electronic voting machines, has made it even easier to manipulate elections.

For anyone looking to hack into its voting machines, the company has conveniently printed instructions right onto the Diebold TS's system board. The Boot Area Configuartion table (pictured below) demonstrates how to make the system boot from an external flash memory unit instead of the internal memory chip with the Diebold software.

01 Aug 2006

Anyone looking to manipulate election results can now craft their own application and load it onto the unit. Just remove the external chip after the election and nobody will ever know. The affected machine after all doesn’t provide a print out for verification purposes.

Diebold has repeatedly been criticized for shipping voting machines that failed to pass internal and external tests. Outside watchdogs have called upon the company to open up its design and software source code, but the company so far has turned down those requests.

Photo: Open Voting Foundation 

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