Pennsylvania's Voting Machines Are Running Windows XP (cbsnews.com)

Slashdot reader rmurph04 writes: As reported by CBS News, the battleground state of Pennsylvania might as well have a target on its back as Election Day nears, the cybersecurity company Carbon Black warned in a new report released Thursday. Across the state, most Pennsylvania counties use particularly high-risk electronic voting machines that leave behind zero paper trails, which could be useful to audit the integrity of votes cast. In addition, many of these machines -- called "direct-recording electronic" machines -- are running on severely outdated operating systems like Windows XP, which has not been patched by Microsoft since 2014.

According to the survey more than one in five registered U.S. voters may stay home on Election Day because of fears about cybersecurity and vote tampering. Respondents believe a U.S. insider threat poses the most risk (28%), followed by Russian hackers (17%) and then the candidates themselves (15%).

Comments

Desktop XP or XP POS

[lister king of smeg]

Are they running the POS or embeded that are still getting updates? Just saying XP isn't exactly helpful.

Why OS?

[ChrisMaple]

Voting machines should be open-source coded in assembly language to run directly on the hardware, and the hardware should be open source - something like a clean-room recreation of a 6502 or Z80. Every gate, every mask, should be verified by hand against the schematics, and every machine code in ROM disassembled by hand and compared against the source listings.

Nothing in the voting mechanisms should be capable of being hidden, nor should it be so complex that one person can't understand and verify the whole thing in a reasonable time, say 1 year.

That means no OS, no proprietary hardware or software, nothing but obvious routines running on "metal".

They sure don't want me to vote in Texas

[shanen]

It's possible I'll get to vote anyway, but they rejected my ballot application the first time with several BS reasons (selected from a long list on the rejection form). Over the last few elections, it has been getting harder and harder to vote, and this latest voter-ID bogosity makes it much more difficult. And stupid.

The hilarious part is that my vote had already been rendered meaningless by the partisan gerrymandering and double-gerrymandering. My so-called Representative is such a worthless tool that they had to rejigger his district to keep it "safe". They are running out of room in the sacrificial districts where they pack in and waste the Democratic votes. They can't draw the district boundaries house by house! Or can they?

I sure hope it's worse than that from the dictators' perspective. The so-called Republicans (really former Dixiecrats "betrayed" by LBJ) have been driving Texas to the bottom so hard and making the state so cheap that a lot of damn Yankees have moved south. Maybe they are about to flip the state back to the Dems, even though the polls have trouble tracking and accounting for first-time-in-district voters. No evidence, but "some people are saying", as the Donald says.

(Also hurts them that Trump is killing the Hispanic vote. This latest insane TwitterWar is NOT the temperament of a potentially great president. If she would have just given him the damn blowjob as payback for maker her a winner, then none of this would have happened!)