Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

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

An issue already facing election season is the reliability of electronic voting. It hasn't been helped by the fact that some engineers were able to program a voting machine to play Pac Man.

Download

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.

Latest Episodes

View All Shows
  • Marketplace Morning Report
    2 hours ago
    7:08
  • Marketplace Tech
    7 hours ago
    11:03
  • Marketplace
    19 hours ago
    25:19
  • Make Me Smart
    a day ago
    19:00
  • This Is Uncomfortable
    3 days ago
    56:05
  • Million Bazillion
    24 days ago
    32:45