The Voting Machine Anyone Can Hack

Presto Vivace writes about a study published by the Virginia Information Technology Agency outlining just how bad the security of the AVS WINVote machine is. "Virginia election officials have decertified an electronic voting system after determining that it was possible for even unskilled people to surreptitiously hack into it and tamper with vote counts. The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. It used the easy-to-crack passwords of 'admin,' 'abcde,' and 'shoup' to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively, according to a scathing security review published Tuesday by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. The agency conducted the audit after one Virginia precinct reported that some of the devices displayed errors that interfered with vote counting during last November's elections."

Comments

Who certified them?

[Holi]

How the hell did something like this get certified in the first place? Seriously, there needs to be an investigation into that and heads should roll.

Re:Paper trail

[PopeRatzo]

What the fuck are you U.S.A.sians doing?

Rigging elections keeps us free. Aren't you paying attention?

Re:I'd Like To See Electronic Voting Work

[CastrTroy]

The biggest problem with designing an electronic voting system is how the voter and election officials are supposed to verify that it's running the correct system on election day. Let's say they did develop a perfect system that was proven to work. How do I verify that said system is even running on the computer when I walk up to it on election day? It could be any system that just shows the proper screens to verify that it is a legitimate system. The only way for me to be sure that my vote was counted correctly would be to be able to check later on some secondary system, which would remove the secret ballot feature.

Compare this to a paper ballot system, where everything is completely transparent. I can watch them seal the empty box at the start of the day, watch my ballot go into the box, and then watch all the ballots be counted at the end of the day. It's easy enough for a 10 year old to understand exactly what's happening. There is very little ability to mass game the entire system. You might be able to put a couple extra votes in a few boxes, but it would take a huge conspiracy to vastly shift the vote across multiple polling stations. With voting on computers, it could be done quite easily.