(Screenshot: YouTube)

A video taken of a touchscreen voting machine in Pennsylvania refusing to capture an Obama vote, and instead casting the vote for Romney, was uploaded to Reddit this morning. The video garnered almost 37,000 upvotes and served up a painful 18 second flashback to post-2004 fear of “stolen votes." After hitting Reddit, the video immediately went viral, ricocheting across news websites and Twitter feeds.

The anonymous user who uploaded the video and goes by the handle centralpavote wrote in the video's YouTube description:

My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.

I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

Gawker spoke to a voter fraud expert who confirmed that the machine is not purposefully or maliciously attempting to keep people from voting for Obama, but instead that it's a mechanical error and simply needs to be re-calibrated. "It's a concern but not because of fraud," the expert said. "That's an obviously miscalibrated iVotronic (ES&S) voting machine... we would recommend that poll workers would recalibrate the machine and everything would be fine."

Now, NBC News reports that the machine in question has been taken out of commission in Pennsylvania. (The anonymous user's Reddit name, centralpavote, indicates that the machine was located in central Pennsylvania.) Score one for outraged internet commenters.

Update:

Mother Jones reports that a representative for the Pennsylvania Department of State has stated that a machine in Perry County, Pennsylvania was removed, re-calibrated and brought back online, but he couldn't confirm that it was the same machine from the YouTube video.

"There was a single complaint, so they recalibrated the machine, did a test run, and put it back online. We've had no complaints since then," the rep told Mother Jones.

Don't do this. (screengrab)

The Argonne National Laboratory's Vulnerability Assessment Team specializes in assessing security weaknesses. They examine physical devices like locks, seals, security tags--and voting machines. How easy is it to hack certain brands of voting machine? Turns out Argonne's Roger Johnston discovered it was way too easy to hack the touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX. That’s a little alarming, since versions of this machine will be used to cast up to 9 million votes on Tuesday, November 6th. (You know, tomorrow.)

In an article in Popular Science magazine, Mr. Johnston explained that he used a "man-in-the-middle" hack on one of the Diebold machines, simply attaching a small microprocessor that allowed him to essentially interfere with whatever the voter intended to do. Worse still, Mr. Johnston says you can do this with pretty much any voting machine, because as far as he knows, most of them are not encrypted. One thing, however, works against any would-be voting machine hacker's malevolent, vote-stealing intentions:

The attacks require physical access. This is easy for insiders, who program the machines for an election or install them. And we would argue it’s typically not that hard for outsiders. A lot of voting machines are sitting around in the church basement, the elementary school gymnasium or hallway, unattended for a week or two before the election. Usually they have really cheap cabinet locks anyone can pick; sometimes they don’t even have locks on them. No one signs for the machines when they show up. No one’s responsible for watching them. Seals on them aren’t much different from the anti-tamper packaging found on food and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Think about tampering with a food or drug product: You think that’s challenging? It’s really not. And a lot of our election judges are little old ladies who are retired, and God bless them, they’re what makes the elections work, but they’re not necessarily a fabulous workforce for detecting subtle security attacks.

Mr. Johnston also said anyone with a little money and know-how could take over a machine with a $10 remote-controlled device, writing, "I want to move it to the point where grandma can't hack elections. We're not there."

For such a serious subject, the video below has a ridiculously incongruous soundtrack. But it illustrates exactly how a voting machine hack might work.