For $26 and an 8th Grade Education, You Can Hack a Voting Machine

[Judi Lynn]

For $26 and an 8th Grade Education, You Can Hack a Voting Machine
John Vibes
August 11, 2015

(ANTIMEDIA) Did you know that for just $26 and an 8th-grade education you can hack a voting machine? This has actually been common knowledge for years, since a study at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois developed a hack to manipulate voting machines just before the 2012 elections.

The researchers who developed the hack were actually able to hijack a Diebold Accuvote TS electronic voting machine, one of the most popular voting systems at the time.

Two of the lead researchers in the study were able to demonstrate a number of different ways that voting machines could be hacked. They used a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8, along with a $15 remote control.They demonstrated that the cheap hack worked from over a half-mile away.

“When the voter hits the ‘vote now’ button to register his votes, we can blank the screen and then go back and vote differently and the voter will be unaware that this has happened. Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock, you don’t have to have state-of-the-art security, but you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in,” Johnson said.

More:
http://theantimedia.org/for-26-and-an-8th-grade-education-you-can-hack-a-voting-machine/

[Scuba]

1. Paper ballots, hand counted, in public, cameras rolling, nothing less.

[valerief]

3. True, but that only works in a democracy, not our fascist state. nt

[SusanCalvin]

6. What I've always said. And

Results posted on the door before the ballots leave.

I'm so glad this seems to be getting more attention lately.

Anybody (well, at least six anybodies in addition to me) want to revive ER news? I would be ecstatic to take a day. And update and share my bookmarks.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php/http:/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x508270

http://election.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x500635

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

2. This is one of those issues that should be imoportant to every potential voter, but despite so much

evidence showing the machines as not only hackable, but hacked, this issue just doesn't ever seem to gain any real traction.

[Scuba]

4. In either party.

[SusanCalvin]

8. And there's a reason for that.

Actually, at least two. They don't see the problem or they're hoping to use it for themselves.

[niyad]

5. in 2012?? bev harris of black box voting showed us this in the debacle of 2000.

[SusanCalvin]

7. Yep.

I know she is persona non grata for good reason, but nevertheless I believe she was one of the first.

And the "fix" was HAVA, which spawned even easier and more wholesale ways to hack!

[jwirr]

9. I have always assumed that it would be too hard to hack a primary because it would have to be

multiple states. Am I wrong?

[Thor_MN]

10. The numbers are roughly the same, but the process may be wildly different.

For example, balloting in our caucus is going to be on Post-It notes or scraps of paper. Regional convention was delegates moving to areas on a gym floor. Don't know what the state convention is like, but Minnesota has primaries that are not hackable by electronic means.

[jwirr]

11. That is good to know as I am in MN. Iowa is also run pretty much like that.

[Stevepol]

12. MN is lucky to have paper to count as happened

in the Franken recount some years ago. But no electronic voting machine is incapable of being rigged or altered. If by hacking you mean altering the results or the programming remotely, it may be true that MN has primaries that "are not hackable by electronic means." But if you mean you can't use memory cards or other ways of altering the programming or a hundred other tricks available to the inner circle to illegally change election results, I don't think any electronic voting machine has that degree of sophistication. In any event, the manufacturer of the machine would perhaps have some insight as to how to change votes since they built the machines and developed the programming to make it seemingly work properly or improperly as the case may be.

[Thor_MN]

13. You don't understand. I'm talking about the primary election, not the general

As that was the question that I responded to. The primary can not be hacked by electronic means as there are no electronics to hack. Each precinct does balloting (we used post it notes, which suck for the purpose because they stick together. Sorry 3M...) and counting was done by multiple people to determine the nominee. From that point, delegates are chosen to go to the regional convention. At the regional convention (at least at mine) the nominee was chosen by people gathering in groups on the gym floor.

I haven't been to a state convention but I assume there are no balloting machines used there either. No machines means no electronic hacking possible. At the regional convention, you count legs and divide by two. The delegate themselves are the ballots. No machines (that I know of, that one lady was kind of stiff, but I think it was arthritis, not robotics)




The general election is different and uses machines to tabulate marks on a paper ballot. The ballots are retained and can be recounted. Each ballot is verified as it is fed into the machine. If it detects an overvote or unreadable ballot, it is spit back out for review. The 4 or so that occurred while I was working as an election judge, I think one was corrected and the other three were recorded as spoiled and the person given a new ballot and instructions to mark more carefully.

With our systems, jiggering the results would be a high risk thing. A recount that catches a systemic discrepancy would mean the end of the company that manufactured that machine.