Article at Think Progress: How easy would it be to rig the next election? <read>
In the popular imagination, this is what election hacking looks like?—?dramatic, national-scale interference that manually rewrites tallies and hands the victory to the outlier. Certainly these attacks may occur. However, they’re only one of a variety of electoral hacks possible against the United States, at a time when hacking attacks are becoming more accessible to threat-actors and nation-state-sponsored attackers are growing more brazen. Yes, hackers may attempt to change the vote totals for American elections?—?but they can also de-register voters, delete critical data, trip up voting systems to cause long lines at polling stations, and otherwise cultivate deep distrust in the legitimacy of election results. If hackers wish to rig a national election, they can do it by changing only small numbers on a state level.
Not just hackers! Insiders. Not just election officials. Contractors, ISPs, voting system vendors, municipal staffers…
One thing all voting machines seem to have in common is that whenever they have been subjected to aggressive testing by hackers, they have fallen apart.
Insecure voting systems are the norm, not the exception
“These machines are just so poorly engineered, the only real way to secure them is to destroy them and start over,” said the University of Michigan’s Matt Bernhard…Voting technology provides a false sense of security?—?and opens up new vulnerabilities
As a result of the work of investigators affiliated with the TTBR and EVEREST, as well as more recent investigations by researchers like Haldeman at the University of Michigan (who installed Pac-Man on a Sequoia DRE in 2010) or Edward Felton and Andrew Appel at Princeton, paperless DRE machines have become less popular. In 2016, their use had declined more than 15 percent since the last presidential election.But in many ways, the remaining uneasily patched DREs have been cast as the bogeyman of voting machines?—?while the other systems’ remarkable vulnerabilities have been ignored.
Meanwhile officials remain complacent <read>
