Voting Machine Security?

Despite all of the assurances officials have offered claiming that election systems are virtually unhackable, researchers recently proved that it’s not only possible to access and alter votes cast on some voting machines – it’s not even difficult.

At its 25th annual conference in July of this year, DEF CON hosted the first Voting Machine Hacking Village in which hackers were given access to 30 popular voting machines, purchased from eBay and government auctions. In less than ninety minutes, one of them had been hacked wirelessly. Soon after, other teams succeeded using a variety of methods from prying open mechanical locks on USB ports to simply plugging in a mouse. Some of the technology exploited has been known since 2003, such as a flaw in Windows XP that allowed access via WiFi.

All in all, the hackathon exposed at least 18 vulnerabilities in e-voting and e-poll book systems that can be studied to improve security going forward. But questions remain as to whether or not these problems can be fixed with software alone. According to some experts, the issue is with the hardware architecture.

One point of interest: This hacking village would not have been possible without the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 2015, when the U.S. Copyright Office issued a key rule allowing hacks to e-voting and tabulating systems, with the caveat that those hacks be used only for research purposes.