How safe is a voting machine if some guys can turn it into a Pac Man machine?

A fair question. And one that frankly we never imagined ourselves asking. But there it is.

We’re only in August but the fall election season is very much under way. I don’t know about your neighborhood but there are already a ton of campaign signs around where we live. And with it the ongoing controversy about the reliability and security of electronic voting.

Today, we want to inject a new angle into that issue: Pac Man. Yes, Pac Man.

A couple of engineers were recently able to take a standard voting machine, hack into it, and program it to play Pac Man. We talk to Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. He worked on the project with Princeton University PhD student Ari Feldman.

See a video of the Pac Man voting machine.