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It's an unavoidable question as Election Day approaches: When we go to the polls, could our very votes be at risk?
More than 45 million U.S. voters, or one out of every four who go to the polls, will cast a ballot on a machine that stores votes electronically, but doesn't create a paper ballot.
Six states -- Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina -- use those machines exclusively and they're used by a "heavy majority" of voters in another five -- including presidential battleground states Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Some of these paperless machines are also used in the key states of Ohio, Florida and Colorado, where the presidential race is expected to be close.
When there's no physical ballot, it becomes next to impossible to determine whether there has been tampering, or some other kind of irregularity, in a close election.
With electronic voting, analysts say that if there's a question about vote totals, there is little to do other than press "Enter" again and let the same computer system that counted the votes the first time count them again.
As early as 2003, a team of researchers commissioned by the state of Maryland reported that machines from vendor Diebold were poorly engineered and showed a "high risk of compromise." Their findings, as noted by the CalTech/MIT report, included the fact that every one of the company's voting systems used the exact same "secret" encryption key.
After a wave of negative press, including a 2006 HBO documentary called "Hacking Democracy" that explored the vulnerability of its electronic voting machines, Diebold removed its name from its voting systems in 2007 and was later bought by another company.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/03/tech/innovation/electronic-vote-security/