Last night's episode of Heroes played right to geeks who care about the shoddy security on e-voting machines. Micah, a character whose talent allows him to manipulate technology, is forced by the bad guys to rig an election run via touchscreen voting machines. The best part? When his captor says, "OK, we'll have to do this in every precinct around New York," and Micah replies, "No we won't -- all the machines are networked." He can rig the entire election from one machine because the security is so sloppy that New York has all its voting machines on a network together.
For e-voting activists who lobby for safe, secure e-voting technologies, this fantasy scenario is all too real. Many states and counties have e-voting machines that a technologically-savvy hacker could easily rig, and most of these machines are networked in some way or another. As 2008 nears, I hope the Heroes scenario reminds citizens that their votes are not safe -- unless they lobby their local officials to buy secure voting machines or get the current voting machines they're using audited by security researchers who aren't being paid by the companies who make the machines in the first place.
