etc. to help explain why we should be concerned that our votes are not being counted as cast with use of DREs, Optical scanners, central tabulators, etc.
How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes
With Russia already meddling in 2016, a ragtag group of obsessive tech experts is warning that stealing the ultimate prize—victory on Nov. 8—would be child’s play.
By BEN WOFFORD
August 05, 2016
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144
SNIP
The Princeton group has a simple message: That the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the iPhones they use to navigate their way there. They’ve seen the skeletons of code inside electronic voting’s digital closet, and they’ve mastered the equipment’s vulnerabilities perhaps better than anyone (a contention the voting machine companies contest, of course). They insist the elections could be vulnerable at myriad strike points, among them the software that aggregates the precinct vote totals, and the voter registration rolls that are increasingly digitized. But the threat, the cyber experts say, starts with the machines that tally the votes and crucially keep a record of them—or, in some cases, don't.
SNIP
Almost from the day they were taken out of the box, the touch-screen machines demonstrated problems (the same companies had a much better track record with Optical Scan machines). During the primaries in Florida in 2002, some machines in Miami-Dade malfunctioned and failed to turn on, resulting in hourslong lines that locked out untold numbers of voters—including then-gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno. That year, faulty software (and an administrator oversight) on Sequoia models led to a fourth of votes initially omitted during early voting in Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County. In Fairfax County, Virginia, an investigation into a 2003 school board race found that a vote was subtracted for every 100 votes cast for one of the candidates on 10 machines. With margin sizes small enough to be noticed, local elections were vaulted into the forefront of these debates; Appel later found himself issuing expert testimony for a tiny election for the Democratic Executive Committee in Cumberland County, New Jersey, where a candidate lost by 24 votes. The margin was small enough that the losers sued, and called 28 voters as witnesses—who each swore they voted for them. The machine in use was a Sequoia AVC Advantage.
Cybersecurity researchers flocked to study the machines, but they say they were faced with an uncompromising adversary: the voting machine companies, which viewed the code of the machines as intellectual property. Until 2009, two companies, Diebold and ES&S, controlled the lion’s share of the voting machine market. The accreditation process is equally narrow: Since 1990, a voluntary federal accreditation process has certified voting technology, a system that has come under fire for its lack of transparency. The laboratories (“Independent Testing Authorities”) which conduct the certification reviews are typically paid by the manufacturers, and are usually required to sign nondisclosure agreements. In 2008, five labs were accredited; one was suspended that year for poor lab procedures, and another temporarily suspended for insufficient quality control.
SNIP
= new reply since forum marked as read
