Hacker Harri Hursti was hired by Bev Harris, an investigative reporter at Black Box Voting, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan elections watchdog group, to determine the security of the electronic voting systems. He hacked the Diebold system in a way that an ordinary election worker—or a chimp named Baxter—could do without being detected. As said at slashdot.org, A million monkeys can write Shakespeare, but it only takes one to mess up an election.

...Black Box Voting purchased a Diebold optical scan with 1.94w firmware, and chose a computer repair shop out of the phone book, took it in, grabbed the first available technician. It took him less than 10 minutes to zero in on the memory card as a point of critical vulnerability -- and oh my, did he point out some other intersting things!

NEW HAMPSHIRE HASN'T UPGRADED SYSTEM SECURITY...

Hursti testified in September, demonstrating the weaknesses and flaws in the system that would be used in New Hampshire. Not only were the Diebold machines faulty, but the company that manages the electronic voting in much of New England at best, takes few precautions to protect the vote, or at worst, enables easy hacking.

The primer on hacking voting machines is at O'Reilly [Tim, not Bill] Media, Behind the Scenes at The Mezonic Agenda: An Electronic Voting Primer, a book that shows how deeply flawed and unreliable electronic systems can be, especially using closed-source software.

The use of the easily hackable electronic machines in New Hampshire could be the reason why exit polls in counties where votes were counted by hand were accurate and the polls in counties using electronic voting machines were inaccurate.