Students hack into D.C. online voting system
Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 11:06 am
Washington Times article
Very happy to see them testing this out like this... but I do wish they had a better sense of humor about it!University of Michigan students hacked a prototype D.C. elections voting site and programmed it to play their fight song, prompting election officials to temporarily take it down.
For the past week The D.C. Board of Elections & Ethics has encouraged outsiders to try to find faults in the system, which was designed to allow some 950 military and overseas voters to cast ballots online. The system had not yet been put into effect, but officials had hoped to use it for the November election. A scaled-back version of the site was relaunched Tuesday.
The students had rigged the site to play the Michigan fight song "The Victors" — which begins with the words "Now for a cheer they are here, triumphant!" — after a ballot was submitted on a "Thank You" page.
Paul Stenbjorn, the board's director of information services, said he didn't bother listening.
"To be quite honest I didn't listen to it. I was less concerned with what the file was. Just knowing it was there was there was enough," Stenbjorn said of the MP3 file students embedded. "No one here is a University of Michigan alum, so we didn't necessarily find it all that amusing."