The 2006 Nedap Voting Machine Fiasco

This was a voting machine planned to be used in the 2006 elections in the Netherlands. It used a four-line 40 character LCD display driven by the Hitachi HD44780 controller. The problem was the manufacturer could not source enough display controllers with the European character set in ROM, so they used the user-defined characters in CGRAM to display the text. Because the software displayed the same string repeatedly in a loop, and repeatedly reprogrammed the CGRAM each time it displayed the character (which was unnecessary, because the CGRAM is persistent provided the power supply to the driver is is maintained) the extra delay in programming the one accented character, the e-grave appearing in "Christen Democratisch Appèl", changed the AM audio frequency emitted by the display and enabled someone with an AM radio within a few meters (up to 25 in some cases) of the voting booth to know when a vote for the CDA had been cast.

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See Electronic Voting in the Netherlands: from early Adoption to early Abolishment
by Bart Jacobs and Wolter Pieters and Studying the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting computer a computer security perspective by Rop Gonggrijp and Willem-Jan Hengeveld.

 


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