Dust off your winmodems, it’s time to subvert democracy!
The phone modems are turned on at 7:00pm on election day allowing the precincts to report totals. This phone communication method is fundamentally stupid. It opens the “crown jewels” (the central database of votes) to outside manipulation by anybody who has that phone number, often NOT changed between elections. Diebold’s software protocols allow standard personal computers to make an incoming connection, not just voting machines. Elections officials would never know that this “rogue” slipped in and manipulated the database.
The description of this exploit indicates that this system’s only layer of security is based on the assumption that an attacker does not have the phone number for the central modem bank. If this is true, the designers are relying on very bad security through obscurity.