5 ms·

Hackers tore apart voting machines. Here's what they found [video]

12 points by Tozen 4y ago

quantified 4y ago
Prior to the 2020 election cycle, electronic voting machines and the process of tabulating their ressults were known to be rife with vulnerabilities, allowing for tampering with votes cast without detection. Particularly troubling are the machines that give you a slip after registering votes, the slip is not guaranteed to match the vote that was registered. Typically, the sense of security in them came from the difficulty in coordinating manipulation of many machines across a nationally significant set of machines. The only reason that these machines are being defended is the way by which they came under attack. Next cycle, a coordinated tampering effort can be applied by American, not foreign, agents and all the machine defenders will be flat-footed. Paper ballots tabulated by scanning are the only ones immune to these shenanigans.
- mc32 4y ago
  Prior to those elections, discussing the security of voting machines was 'academic' and only concerning from a sec PoV, but after those elections it became somewhat taboo to discuss the academic aspects of voting machine security for fear it 'legitimized' certain recount requests as well as other accusations around legitimacies...
  - quantified 4y ago
    Academic because people didn't care. It was publicized reasonably well, just didn't take root.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  It’s absurd that our insecure voting system is not only dependent on proprietary software, but on proprietary software developed by a foreign company. Why is a company with offices in Serbia and Canada responsible for the security of US elections? Forgive me if I won’t blindly place my faith in the motives of the programmers or the program’s correctness.
  - moistly 4y ago
    The ballot and scanner should be open-source, hardware and software, replicable by any concerned citizen. If they are concerned that the votes are miscounted, the scan can be run on their box as well. The boxes should be designed for serial daisy-chaining of the ballots. There should be a way for them to verify one another’s source code.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  And tabulated ballots are vulnerable to being replaced with fakes.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Sure, but that takes physical, observable action. It's much easier to detect.
  - quantified 4y ago
    Different systems will have different shenanigans. The demo of the EDS system (in Pennsylvania, IIRC) had a Democratic congresswoman coming up to cast a ballot, for herself naturally, and it registered for her opponent. Why she shrugged that off, I have no idea. I think a lot of people just assume "it's a computer so it must be better". Note [https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/diebold_admits_that_its_e-voting_machines_drop_votes/ https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/diebold_admits_that_its_e-...] and [http://www.votersunite.org/info/ES&Sinthenews.pdf http://www.votersunite.org/info/ES&Sinthenews.pdf]
  - Tozen 4y ago
    No system will ever be perfect, but it can be made harder to tamper with, like using voter-verifiable paper records with voting machines. The process of tampering can be made significantly to exponentially more difficult, if those in charge really want to safeguard democracy and fair elections. But part of the problem is, a significant number cares not for democracy nor fair elections, and simply want their person, group, or people to win and be in charge. Faulty and vulnerable systems are a way to get what they want.
    - LorenPechtel 4y ago
      Yeah, I think electronic voting with voter-verified paper backups is the best we can do. That's what we use here--there's a long paper tape in the machine that your vote is printed on and you confirm it's right. Any attempt to mess with it would require tampering with both the machine and that long tape--can't splice in a part. And I don't think it's so much they want faulty systems, but rather that as usual with closed systems there simply is no incentive to do better.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  >Paper ballots tabulated by scanning are the only ones immune to these shenanigans. Every single faulty election in history thus known has been a paper ballot election. I have been an election judge for 15 years. I take my civic duty extremely seriously but if a fantasy action-movie plot compelled me to tamper with an election, paper ballots would be my preferred method. Yes, even without detection. Every single children's birthday party magician who has ever lived possesses the dexterity needed to switch out ballot boxes and the seals used to secure ballot boxes are just as easily tampered with as the seals on electronic machines and every single person who owns a No. 2 pencil has the skill needed to pre-mark ballots. This may come as a shock and surprise to you, but in nearly every single precinct in every single county of every single state, the way the ballot boxes get from the polling place to the tabulating facility is: a dude or dudette in a car, alone. You can say: voting machines need their code audited, the firmware needs to be open-source, the security measures need to be better But saying that moving around pieces of paper in a plastic bucket is more secure than properly-implemented electronic voting machines is so absurd it boggles my mind.
  - quantified 4y ago
    That aspect that you just mentioned, the unmonitored poll worker: if that's true, it needs to be trumpeted far and wide. Note the partisan rejiggering of the election systems underway. However, since the tales of fraud involving mechanical voting machines in big cities are well-known, I do have to question whether you are using hyperbole or ignorance for the only-paper-has-had-big-fraud statement. The seals on electronic voting systems didn't need to be tampered with.
    - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
      >That aspect that you just mentioned, the unmonitored poll worker: if that's true, it needs to be trumpeted far and wide. If you want to help fix it, be my guest. Elections almost everywhere in the entire nation are “run” by volunteer or meagerly-paid regular citizens, not government officials. The boards of election only exist to warehouse equipment, supervise the count, and write SOPs for the judges, who only work a few days per election cycle. My county has over 200 polling places with approximately 2000 election judges— and a board of elections with about 80 government officials as staff. Judges aren’t government employees they are just regular people sworn into role for a set term. The “lone person taking the ballots back for tabulation” happens because there are only a handful of chief judges, and only chief judges are allowed to move ballots. They made me a chief judge despite not being a member of a political party (chief judges are supposed to be, for a variety of reasons) because there were literally and actually no other human beings in the entire county willing to do it. Now my 40s, I’ve been the youngest pollworker by 20-or-so years at every precinct I’ve worked and every polling place, everywhere, is short staffed. Last election, the primary, I was the only person out of eight (we were supposed to have 11, no breaks for us!!!) who was fit enough to set up the folding tables. Lever machines are just as easy to stuff as a plastic bin full of paper. I suppose we could just invent extra people out of thin air, but I don’t know how to do that so the ballots go back to the board of elections in the trunk of my car.
avgDev 4y ago
HN should delete these kind of submissions. The title is extreme click-bait. CLICK HERE, YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT THEY FOUND! DOCTORS HATE THIS ONE TRICK, WATCH THIS VIDEO! Seriously, I like HN because of generally decent articles and NORMAL old school titles without click bait.

12 points by Tozen 4y ago

Prior to the 2020 election cycle, electronic voting machines and the process of tabulating their ressults were known to be rife with vulnerabilities, allowing for tampering with votes cast without detection. Particularly troubling are the machines that give you a slip after registering votes, the slip is not guaranteed to match the vote that was registered. Typically, the sense of security in them came from the difficulty in coordinating manipulation of many machines across a nationally significant set of machines. The only reason that these machines are being defended is the way by which they came under attack. Next cycle, a coordinated tampering effort can be applied by American, not foreign, agents and all the machine defenders will be flat-footed. Paper ballots tabulated by scanning are the only ones immune to these shenanigans.

mc32 4y ago
Prior to those elections, discussing the security of voting machines was 'academic' and only concerning from a sec PoV, but after those elections it became somewhat taboo to discuss the academic aspects of voting machine security for fear it 'legitimized' certain recount requests as well as other accusations around legitimacies...
- quantified 4y ago
  Academic because people didn't care. It was publicized reasonably well, just didn't take root.
TechBro8615 4y ago
It’s absurd that our insecure voting system is not only dependent on proprietary software, but on proprietary software developed by a foreign company. Why is a company with offices in Serbia and Canada responsible for the security of US elections? Forgive me if I won’t blindly place my faith in the motives of the programmers or the program’s correctness.
- moistly 4y ago
  The ballot and scanner should be open-source, hardware and software, replicable by any concerned citizen. If they are concerned that the votes are miscounted, the scan can be run on their box as well. The boxes should be designed for serial daisy-chaining of the ballots. There should be a way for them to verify one another’s source code.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
And tabulated ballots are vulnerable to being replaced with fakes.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Sure, but that takes physical, observable action. It's much easier to detect.
- quantified 4y ago
  Different systems will have different shenanigans. The demo of the EDS system (in Pennsylvania, IIRC) had a Democratic congresswoman coming up to cast a ballot, for herself naturally, and it registered for her opponent. Why she shrugged that off, I have no idea. I think a lot of people just assume "it's a computer so it must be better". Note [https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/diebold_admits_that_its_e-voting_machines_drop_votes/ https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/diebold_admits_that_its_e-...] and [http://www.votersunite.org/info/ES&Sinthenews.pdf http://www.votersunite.org/info/ES&Sinthenews.pdf]
- Tozen 4y ago
  No system will ever be perfect, but it can be made harder to tamper with, like using voter-verifiable paper records with voting machines. The process of tampering can be made significantly to exponentially more difficult, if those in charge really want to safeguard democracy and fair elections. But part of the problem is, a significant number cares not for democracy nor fair elections, and simply want their person, group, or people to win and be in charge. Faulty and vulnerable systems are a way to get what they want.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    Yeah, I think electronic voting with voter-verified paper backups is the best we can do. That's what we use here--there's a long paper tape in the machine that your vote is printed on and you confirm it's right. Any attempt to mess with it would require tampering with both the machine and that long tape--can't splice in a part. And I don't think it's so much they want faulty systems, but rather that as usual with closed systems there simply is no incentive to do better.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
>Paper ballots tabulated by scanning are the only ones immune to these shenanigans. Every single faulty election in history thus known has been a paper ballot election. I have been an election judge for 15 years. I take my civic duty extremely seriously but if a fantasy action-movie plot compelled me to tamper with an election, paper ballots would be my preferred method. Yes, even without detection. Every single children's birthday party magician who has ever lived possesses the dexterity needed to switch out ballot boxes and the seals used to secure ballot boxes are just as easily tampered with as the seals on electronic machines and every single person who owns a No. 2 pencil has the skill needed to pre-mark ballots. This may come as a shock and surprise to you, but in nearly every single precinct in every single county of every single state, the way the ballot boxes get from the polling place to the tabulating facility is: a dude or dudette in a car, alone. You can say: voting machines need their code audited, the firmware needs to be open-source, the security measures need to be better But saying that moving around pieces of paper in a plastic bucket is more secure than properly-implemented electronic voting machines is so absurd it boggles my mind.
- quantified 4y ago
  That aspect that you just mentioned, the unmonitored poll worker: if that's true, it needs to be trumpeted far and wide. Note the partisan rejiggering of the election systems underway. However, since the tales of fraud involving mechanical voting machines in big cities are well-known, I do have to question whether you are using hyperbole or ignorance for the only-paper-has-had-big-fraud statement. The seals on electronic voting systems didn't need to be tampered with.
  - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
    >That aspect that you just mentioned, the unmonitored poll worker: if that's true, it needs to be trumpeted far and wide. If you want to help fix it, be my guest. Elections almost everywhere in the entire nation are “run” by volunteer or meagerly-paid regular citizens, not government officials. The boards of election only exist to warehouse equipment, supervise the count, and write SOPs for the judges, who only work a few days per election cycle. My county has over 200 polling places with approximately 2000 election judges— and a board of elections with about 80 government officials as staff. Judges aren’t government employees they are just regular people sworn into role for a set term. The “lone person taking the ballots back for tabulation” happens because there are only a handful of chief judges, and only chief judges are allowed to move ballots. They made me a chief judge despite not being a member of a political party (chief judges are supposed to be, for a variety of reasons) because there were literally and actually no other human beings in the entire county willing to do it. Now my 40s, I’ve been the youngest pollworker by 20-or-so years at every precinct I’ve worked and every polling place, everywhere, is short staffed. Last election, the primary, I was the only person out of eight (we were supposed to have 11, no breaks for us!!!) who was fit enough to set up the folding tables. Lever machines are just as easy to stuff as a plastic bin full of paper. I suppose we could just invent extra people out of thin air, but I don’t know how to do that so the ballots go back to the board of elections in the trunk of my car.

avgDev 4y ago

HN should delete these kind of submissions. The title is extreme click-bait. CLICK HERE, YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT THEY FOUND! DOCTORS HATE THIS ONE TRICK, WATCH THIS VIDEO! Seriously, I like HN because of generally decent articles and NORMAL old school titles without click bait.