Security Firm Shows How To Hack a US Voting Machine (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "Three days before the US Presidential Election takes place, California-based security firm Cylance showed the world how easy it is to hack one of the many [electronic] voting machine models that will be deployed at voting stations across the US on Election Day." Bleeping Computer reports that "The machine that Cylance researchers chose for their test was the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1, one of the most popular models... The technique researchers created modifies the Public Counter, but also the Protective Counter, which is a backup mechanism that acts as a redundant verification system to ensure the first vote results are valid." Physical access is needed to hack the machine, but the hack takes a short time to perform.
FBI Director James Comey said in September that America's voting machines would be hard to compromise because they're not connect to the internet, but these researchers simply used a PCMCIA card to reflash the machine's firmware. Comey also made the reassuring point that it's hard to "hack into" America's voting system because "it's so clunky and dispersed. It's Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop at the gym."

Comments

physical access to machine?

[OffTheLip]

How do bad actors accomplish that on a large scale?

Re:physical access to machine?

[Zak3056]

They and a few hundred of their friends could register to vote?

Guaranteed physical access to at least one machine per person involved in the conspiracy. Flipping a few key precincts is all you need to have a high probability of changing a US presidential election outcome.

Re:physical access to machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do bad actors accomplish that on a large scale?

For example, there are Democratic Party's employees in every single town in the US, they are very well funded and organized, and even an 80 year old drunkard can simply insert and remove a pre-configured PCMCIA card, there's no need for "hackers"...

Re: physical access to machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

And there are plenty of republican counterparts. So what's your point?

Re:physical access to machine?

[Entrope]

For the most part, they'd need to be registered in each precinct. Registering with a fake address is one of the easier forms of voting fraud to detect.

Re:physical access to machine?

[pushing-robot]

Everybody knows a four hundred pound hacker can cyber in and PCMCIA over the Internet. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough.

Re: physical access to machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the Wikileaks' revelations, if I had to guess which part vote rigging could ever come from, I would definitely opt for Clinton. If a person is financed by Goldman Sachs, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, surely ethics isn't really a big deal for her, not to mention that we've just discovered that the same person is allowed to illegally process classified information on a private computer, which used to be a federal crime until few months ago.
I would feel safer and more reassured if voting count was performed by Cosa Nostra, at least they have some sort of "honor" to preserve.

Re:physical access to machine?

[rmdingler]

For the most part, they'd need to be registered in each precinct. Registering with a fake address is one of the easier forms of voting fraud to detect.

Yes. There is also little need to rig the precincts because the two-party system itself dominates the electoral landscape.

Here are your "choices", voters! Aren't you grateful you live in a free Republic?

Re:physical access to machine?

[secretsquirel]

they make them..

Re:physical access to machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

> They and a few hundred of their friends could register to vote?

And then they would have to actually travel to each location.
WHICH YOU CAN NOT DO VIA THE INTERNET

Re:physical access to machine?

[dohzer]

Kinda like the could by switching good paper with bad paper ballots?

Re:physical access to machine?

[ArchieBunker]

Break into the warehouse where the machines sit for 4 years...

Re:physical access to machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every two years.

When they come out of storage, ready for election season, they're set to factory settings.

What I do object to is that the machine's hardware/code is not available to the public for scrutiny. Also the way the machine's are procured is highly diabolical!

Re: physical access to machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is different from the other candidate being sponsored by loans from other foreign countries? How? Should the USA get rid of foreign sponsorships for its national leader, should be the more appropriate question, and work for America!

Re:physical access to machine?

[Geoffrey.landis]

How do bad actors accomplish that [physical access] on a large scale?

Voting machines are stored when they are not in use, and in general, the places they are stored are not guarded by armed guards. (And, more to the point, are not guarded by pairs of armed guards.)

To get physical access to the machines, you just need to get a key to the warehouse that they're kept in. Try the janitor.

There are a large number of people associated with each voting precinct. You just need to insert one person. And you don't need to alter all the machines-- just a few.

Re: physical access to machine?

[buchanmilne]

Pay residents (or even better, just ask rabid supporters of one party amd tell them they can help their party win) of different voting districts to register and then do the 'needful' on voting day.

Considering recent fraud operations ny syndicates have managed to withdraw funds from 1400 ATMs in 2 hours (e.g. http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/2...) it really shouldn't be significantly more difficult to swing an election result.

Re:physical access to machine?

[aaarrrgggh]

Doesn't need to be a very large scale-- a few key precincts in each of a few key states could likely tilt the presidential election and be very hard to detect. P0wning a single county could easily skew a senate race, a couple house races, and maybe a governor.

Unfortunately with the state of politics in the US, it is so stupidly divisive and partisan that few places have a margin of more than 3-5% on a presidential election.

Re:physical access to machine?

[jbmartin6]

They don't need to, they just need to go after a few machines in Florida or some other closely contested district. But still a good point, would a gamble like this be worth the cost and the risk? Maybe, since the risk could be limited to the dupes who did the actual work.

Re:physical access to machine?

[TheRaven64]

You don't need to do it on that large a scale, especially for the Presidential elections. In 2012, which wasn't a particularly close election, flipping 63 electoral college votes would have let the Republicans win. Either Washington State or Colorado and California turning red would have changed the election outcome. Changing California red (by one vote) would have required changing 1,507,164 votes. Los Angeles alone had enough votes for Obama that compromising it and making it around 80% Romney would have been enough to flip California. It would probably be quite suspicious if polling were that wrong, but scattering a few attack devices throughout Democrat-voting areas and reducing the majority there would probably not have been picked up, and if it's only two states where the polling is particularly different from the eventual outcome then people won't be too suspicious.

2000 was a lot closer. Changing only 5 Electoral College votes would have changed the outcome. If Al Gore had carried his home state, no one would have been particularly surprised and that would have ensured that he won with a fairly large margin. Rigging the voting machines so that 40,115 Republican votes across the state were counted as Democratic wouldn't have raised any eyebrows, but would have inverted the outcome of the national election. The election was hotly contested because Bush won Florida by a mere 537 votes, giving him all of the state's 24 Electoral College votes. A single compromised voting machine could easily have moved 269 votes from Bush to Gore and changed the election outcome. Of course, some will claim that compromised voting machines did flip around that number in the opposite direction...

Re:physical access to machine?

[Wycliffe]

When they come out of storage, ready for election season, they're set to factory settings.

Factory reset isn't going to do you any good if the firmware has been flashed.

What I do object to is that the machine's hardware/code is not available to the public for scrutiny.

This isn't going to do you any good either as even if you have the source code and the machine code of what is suppose to be on one of the dozens of machines, how do you verify that one or more of the machines haven't been flashed with a modified firmware?

My county uses scantrons. This seems like a reasonable compromise between quick counting and accountability. There are multiple machines. It would be easy to run the entire stack through a second or third machine to verify that the results are accurate. You could even run the stack through a 2nd machine created by a completely different company and you could also count by hand if necessary.

Re:physical access to machine?

[Geoffrey.landis]

Every two years.

When they come out of storage, ready for election season, they're set to factory settings.

Are they? By whom?

That would be the clearly best time to compromise the machine; you even have a perfect excuse for opening it up and meddling with the settings. "I'm just re-initializing the flash, according to procedure." You think the poll watchers have the slightest expertise in telling whether you're initializing to factory settings, whether you're installing an approved security patch, or whether you're installing malware?

What I do object to is that the machine's hardware/code is not available to the public for scrutiny.

Yep.

Also the way the machine's are procured is highly diabolical!

Don't know how machines are procured, so I can't comment on that one.

Re: physical access to machine?

[dirk]

Except for the fact you have only seen emails from one side. There is nothing to say the Trump side isn;t just as corrupt, we just haven't seen it.

That is what I find interesting about the reaction to the Clinton email leaks. Most of what is reported is stuff I have assumed goes on on both sides for a long time (dirty tricks, collusion with Super PACs, name calling, etc.) The difference in this case is we have an inside view of one of the sides so we can see it being done. There was very little shocking, it is just because of the hacked emails, we now have seen the inner workings of one side. There is nothing to say the other side isn't just as bad, we just haven't seen it yet.

Re:physical access to machine?

[rwiggers]

Compromise someone in charge of programming the firmware on the machines... Just need the injection in the correct place on the supply chain and one single person compromised.

Electronic voting is very good, efficient and solves a lot of other fraud possibilities. Also the financial/power gain for compromising the system is extremely high and that should be accounted for in the design phase. A lot of things could be done, but there seems to be lack of interest. Paper trail, independent code memory checksum displayed on machine, proper cryptography on data, open source code.... the list goes on...

Re:physical access to machine?

[harrkev]

WHICH YOU CAN NOT DO VIA THE INTERNET

Yeah, moving the vote to the Internet is the easiest way to make it safer. It is a good thing that the Internet is a currently more secure than Fort Knox.

Re:physical access to machine?

[bobbied]

I'm not as concerned, but hey, I live in Texas where the outcome of the election is rarely in doubt and where there is little to be gained by doing this.. However..

I seriously doubt that this kind of "hacking" would be a serious problem in all but the most corrupt areas, and even then, it is pretty much a given that it would be hard to get away with it. First you need to have the firmware that does what you want. How do you get a viable bit of firmware that is altered to your wishes? You are going to need access to the source code, or somebody who can alter and build you what you want. Second, you are going to need to get physical access to the machines which are set up and running long enough to flash new firmware undetected. And Third, everybody involved will need to keep their mouths shut. Fourth, you are going to have to switch enough votes to make a difference, without going too far so it's obvious somebody tampered with the results and usually election results are not THAT close.

Now, I don't think that it is impossible for the government organizations that count votes (usually the county election commission) to be corrupted enough that they'd want to throw an election one way or another, or that a precinct or two might not have election judges from both sides that would willingly look the other way while the rules are broken, but I really cannot imagine too many situations (short of Al Gore's multiple recounts thing) where it would be a wide spread problem or throw an election.

So, let's be vigilant and by all means do what we can for security here, including encryption and cryptographic signing of everything to ensure the integrity of the vote, but let's not go off the deep end with claiming that election machines are rigged in mass numbers or that the small amounts of voter fraud we do see are all that material to most of our elections.

Re:physical access to machine?

[hey!]

Except the US government does not have custody of or access to the machines. The machines are owned, operated, and secured by local governments.

Thus an effort to by the US government to hack the machines would entail clandestine physical access to the machines -- a "black bag job". And to throw the electoral college you need to do a lot of burglaries in a big state, or a lot of burglaries distributed across multiple small states. In 2000 it could have been done by hacking a single precinct (about 2500 voters in FL), but nobody could have known it would be quite that close; so you'd really need to hack a lot of machines to be sure, and if you're doing something like that you want to be very sure. It's a cost/benefit calculation: hack too little you risk getting caught and undermining a legitimate victory; hack too much and your risk of getting caught goes up rapidly as more people and places are involved. Nobody could know in 2000 that the margin would come down to 537 out of eight million registered voters.

And in 2016 the risk/benefit math is dominated by this fact: if you add up all the safe states for each candidate, Clinton has to win just 18 EVs from the remaining contended states; Trump needs to win 107. If Clinton wins just one of the five largest contested states she wins the electoral college; this amounts to five rounds of single elimination for Trump. On top of this there is a massive disparity in ground game. Trump only started to organize get-out-the-vote (GOTV) infrastructure in the final weeks of the campaign, making it difficult for him to score upsets over polling. Clinton has been preparing her ground game for years.

So it makes no sense for Clinton (supposing she had friends in the FBI or CIA to help her) to risk undermining the legitimacy of an election she is very, very probably going to win.

All that said, voting machines DO pose a serious threat to the legitimacy of local elections. Also, voting machine malfunctions could well throw the presidential election one way or the other.

Re:physical access to machine?

[Zak3056]

While some voting precincts have the machines out in the open, many still respect the tradition of privacy and have the machine in a booth, with a curtain.

Re:physical access to machine?

[Zak3056]

You'll note that, apart from rigging the machine, I did not suggest any other form of voter fraud needed to be a part of the conspiracy. Your confederates could actually live in those precincts (or live there just long enough to establish residency and vote there).

I'm not suggesting this especially realistic, just that this is how one could gain physical access to many voting machines to tamper with an election, which was the question asked by the OP.

Re:physical access to machine?

[Zak3056]

Physical access is physical. Thanks for pointing that out, most of us were completely unaware of that fact.

You're assuming I'm stupid, but you're the guy yelling in bolded text about something I didn't even suggest.

Re:physical access to machine?

[budgenator]

How do bad actors accomplish that on a large scale?

You don't need to do it on a large scale, with the Electoral College Electors allocated on a all or nothing basis in all but 2 states, a small amount of fraud conducted in a few swing-states is enough to change a national election. Basically all you have to do is look at where the candidates are conducting rallies in the last 2 weeks, and you'll see where a little fraud will go a long way.

Re:physical access to machine?

[The-Ixian]

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! He is almost certainly not rigging the election!

Re:physical access to machine?

[budgenator]

Actually it would be good for Texas to rig some of the vote to the Dems and make it seem worth their while to spend some money in your state; I know in 2004 I was kind of pissed that Obama didn't even bother to come to Michigan and spend a little money in the local economy.

Re: physical access to machine?

[budgenator]

And that is different from the other candidate being sponsored by loans from other foreign countries? How? Should the USA get rid of foreign sponsorships for its national leader, should be the more appropriate question, and work for America!

We did make that illegal a while ago; now they have to launder the money through charitable foundations and speaker's fees.

Re: physical access to machine?

[budgenator]

I always assumed the hacks were from a disgusted insider, Bernie Sander was totally screwed by the DNC. The leaks are likely retaliation for that.Trump simply doesn't have the Political machine to pull off the level of corruption you see from the Clinton campaign; it takes decades to get enough dirt on people to be able to bully them around like Hillary does.

Re: physical access to machine?

[Wycliffe]

Scantron is best. Easily and understandably verified by hand, quickly countable by machine. Random audits can verify paper and program count are in agreement.

I agree. I don't understand why anyone uses anything else. We do also have a digital screen for the handicapped but I believe even that prints a completed scantron for you and if it doesn't it should.

Re:physical access to machine?

[Archangel Michael]

Which is why I will ONLY support Paper Ballots. Further, I will ONLY support single day voting, and in person with Ink Stains on fingers (except for VERY rare cases).

The system is ripe for fraud, and there is just about no real way to detect it, because there is no mechanism to do so built into our current system.

Of course, there will be the requisite person saying "there is no fraud", which is why I voted six times already (since there is no fraud, it isn't fraud, right?)

Re:physical access to machine?

[Archangel Michael]

Electronic voting doesn't solve any "fraud", it just opens up new avenues. And since there is no way to validate the vote afterwards, it is an easy point to attack.

And this is why you see "calibration" error videos where picking one candidate actually selects the other. It isn't "fraud" without intent, and you can't prove intent with a machine. And since it is a machine, any fraud actually happened elsewhere.

Re:physical access to machine?

[apoc.famine]

To get physical access to the machines, you just need to get a key to the warehouse that they're kept in.....And you don't need to alter all the machines-- just a few.

I think you're overstating the ease of this. I have absolutely no idea where they keep the voting machines in my city between elections. I don't know if it's in one location or many. I don't know if they are somewhat distributed based on where they are used, or all in one central location. I'm guessing that only a small handful of people know these details. How do you propose figuring that out without arousing suspicion? Take all the janitors out for drinks and ask them about the warehouse contents? How do you know what janitor to ask out for drinks? Are you going to plant spies outside the voting location to watch them load the machines onto the truck, and then trail them back to the storage location?

So lets suppose you figure out where they keep them, the models, and you have your nefarious software ready to go. Which ones do you alter? How do you know? How can you be sure that they won't update the software before the next election?
 
You can't be doing this a week before the election - people are already likely starting to put the logistics in place. Dusting off the machines, running the start-up procedures and test units, moving them to more secure locations. You need to do this well before the election, but at that point, you don't necessarily know what machines will be moved to what location, and whether or not you're just rigging a vote for the person who is going to win anyway in that district, or flipping the vote in a way that would be blatantly obvious based on the previous voting records. You likely don't know if this is going to matter at all, because who could have picked the one district in FL in 2000 that would have made the difference? You're as likely to end up flipping a very blue district slightly red, or vice-versa, as much as you are to flip a near 50/50 split just to your side. Do the first, and it's clear that there was tampering. Do you then design more complicated software to do a statistical analysis on the final vote tally and then adjust or not?

It really is harder than you're making it out to be. Not impossible, but not trivial in the least.

Re:physical access to machine?

[bobbied]

Where I like the way you think, I'm not ready to start rigging things to either parties advantage. Besides, as there is a huge influx of displaced liberals moving to Texas for work from places like CA which bring the same tax and spend mindset that displaced them in the first place, there is no need to rig things. They are making up more and more of the voters so, unless something drastic happens, Texas will be a swing state eventually.

Eventually they will kill this golden egg laying goose too and we will all have to move on to states that are not bankrupt...

Re:physical access to machine?

[BlackPignouf]

2000 was a lot closer.

Indeed, Al Gore only got 543895 votes more than Bush, so Bush would have had to compromise only a few machines to switch 275000 votes in order to win.
Wait a minute! Your electoral system is fricking retarded, so Bush didn't have to change anything!

Re:physical access to machine?

[aaarrrgggh]

It is the difference between controlling the outcome and influencing the outcome. Advertising appeals to 10% of the voters generally considered in-play, with a limited success rate. If you have 10MM people in the state, you are advertising to 1MM, and realistically influencing 100k actual voters to flip. Doing the same across a dozen precincts (obviously depending on size) can quickly have a bigger impact. Keeping it undetectable means you need a broader impact, but not impossible...

Re:physical access to machine?

[hey!]

This is a key element of conspiracy theories: they have to be large and the secrecy is assumed to be perfect.

Re:physical access to machine?

[hey!]

Geographic density doesn't matter, it's the number of voters per machine and the procedures used to secure each machine. Where voters are spread out machines are spread out too; where voters are concentrated so are the machines. So if you want to tamper without producing statistically obvious results it's still a big job involving lots of devices.

Now the machines in Harris County are particularly braindead from a security standpoint. However as the machines are physically sealed after being configured it would have to be done by (a) the Republican County Clerk or (b) someone at the precinct. It'd take a lot of precincts to swing Texas to Clinton, because Trump is polling 9.4% ahead of Clinton. If Clinton wins Texas by tampering, it'll be fishy in an obvious way.

The best target for machine tampering, by far, would be North Carolina. It is currently a dead heat there and it has exactly enough EVs to swing the election to Clinton, which means its the smallest state where you could theoretically pull this off. Still, we're talking about a state where 4.5 million people cast their vote in 2012. Even if the polling is statistically tied, it'd take a lot of subverted machines to exceed the margin of error. Watch the exit polling.

I'd say that given the bar is 270 EVs and Clinton has 252 save EVs, anything over, say 300 EVs means that tampering wouldn't have made any difference. And given that Clinton has her own stats geeks working on this she'd have a pretty good idea if she was heading for a decisive victory. If she tops out at

Still, everyone should go to optical scan ballots. They're practically tamper-proof, auditable, and can be tallied fast enough for all practical purposes.

Re:physical access to machine?

[Wycliffe]

The biggest difficulty with this change is the addition of polling stations and personnel to deal with the logistics of having 60-100 million people vote on the same day.

This is a non-issue. You aren't trying to get 60 million people to vote at one place. If you set up the proper amount of polling places you won't have a problem. Same with lines at polling booths. The only reason it's an issue is because the people managing it are morons. My county uses scantrons. Everyone goes to their local school. There are 3-4 people handing out ballots, about a dozen stations to vote at and 1 machine to drop your ballot in when your done. I'm in and out in under 15 minutes with the majority of the time being the time spent actually filling out the bubbles. I've never had to wait to vote and I'm not in some tiny town either. There are multiple colleges in my town too so we also have to deal with the influx of a large amount of students. Again, it's a non-issue. You know how many people live in a given area and approximately how long it takes them to vote. We have a polling place for about 1 in every 5000 people and as some of those are children and many people don't vote each polling place probably only sees around 1000 people. It's easily manageable even if every person did decide to vote.

Re:physical access to machine?

[rwiggers]

It solves things like vote copying (carbon copy of the ballot to "prove" who you voted for), counting fraud, vote "interpretation" and some other similar variants, which were common at least here in Brazil before the electronic voting system. Other venues were open with the system used in Brazil, which is very fragile in my humble opinion.
There are many ways to validate the vote afterwards, but the system must be planned for that. I sincerely hope to never vote on paper again, but our system here needs urgently to the upgraded. Voting machines are overly complex, code isn't open, no way of independent verification of the binary code on the machine during the election, no independent second copy of voting (paper trail, for example).
I think that the system stands simply because the risk of being outed for compromising it (by someone in the system) is too high.

Re:physical access to machine?

[budgenator]

Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz said "Never put additional effort into a failed stoke", that's what most people don't get, if what your doing is a failure, doing it harder is just going to make it a bigger failure. Liberals love the "Bigs", but Big Business, Big Government and Big Religion always implode under their own corruption; the more the three Bigs collude, the quicker they implode.

Re:physical access to machine?

[Coren22]

Posting from the future, it looks like Trump won Texas by about 9%, pretty amazing how close those polls were.

[redacted]

[Anonymous Coward]

[redacted]

America can be saved embarrassment

[MightyDrunken]

So Sanders has a chance after all.

Re:America can be saved embarrassment

[91degrees]

UK Bookies William Hill are offering odds of Bernie Sanders at 66/1... Which seems bizarrely low (Johnson is at 250/1, for comparison and he's actually on the ballot).

Bear in mind that Leicester City had odds of 5000-1 against winning the Premiership, (and they did), so stranger things have happened.

Re:America can be saved embarrassment

[meta-monkey]

Odds are largely determined by where people are placing their bets. The house always wins...they're not guessing. Sanders has 66/1 odds because some morons actually put money there. But nobody's betting on aleppo-man, so he's got worse odds.

Bullshit defense

[geekmux]

"Comey also made the reassuring point that it's hard to "hack into" America's voting system because "it's so clunky and dispersed..."

Did the FBI just use "clunky and dispersed" as an excuse to dismiss the lack of security surrounding the very core of our democratic process?

What kind of ignorant fuckery is this shit?

How about we properly mitigate security risks with a common sense approach that's a bit better than relying on Mary and Fred under the basketball hoop.

Did he recently meet someone out on a tarmac or something? Just curious...

Re:Bullshit defense

[CajunArson]

How is that a bullshit defense?
I've heard the self-appointed security experts scream about how bad "monocultures" are for security, and Comey basically just said that there isn't a monoculture in the voting systems. That should be a good thing.

Re:Bullshit defense

[dywolf]

its not ignorant just because you don't understand the point being made.

theyre making the point that because we don't have a uniform centralized system controlled from the top down anyone who actually wants to attack the electoral process would have to expend a tremendous amount of resources to have any affect.

my county uses paper ballots, that go into a scantron type scanner permanently attached to a large pelican case. the scanner is non-networked. the next county over still uses punch cards (hopefully of a better quality than Florida's). in both cases the final tally is only accessibly by authorized personnel who must physically transcribe the number, with multiple person verification, onto a form that's reported to the sec state.

the clunky and dispersed nature of the system IS a form of security, rather than a lack of it.
an attacker might be able to exploit a flaw in the machines or even the people used by one county, but that's it. the attack can't proceed any further than that one county. to scale up requires an equal level scaling up in the size of the conspiracy and it simply becomes unworkable and unreasonable to actually pull off.

Re:Bullshit defense

[GNious]

Mono-cultures are bad, but heterogenic IT environments are not inherently good - they still need to be otherwise safe, and not merely rely on being "varied".

Re:Bullshit defense

[flyingfsck]

Comey is quite correct actually. The USA is very large, with thousands of voting stations. Compromising one or two machines may be easy, but compromising thousands, not. Maybe you should come out for fresh air more often for a reality check.

Re:Bullshit defense

[Calydor]

How clunky and dispersed was Hillary's email server?

Re:Bullshit defense

[geekmux]

Comey is quite correct actually. The USA is very large, with thousands of voting stations. Compromising one or two machines may be easy, but compromising thousands, not. Maybe you should come out for fresh air more often for a reality check.

Here's a breath of fresh air for you. The wealthy and powerful spend millions of dollars to essentially buy (the legal term is fund) an election to ensure their selected candidate wins, so never underestimate the effort many take to ensure a win. A Secretary of State used connections to threaten Attorney Generals on tarmacs to avoid prosecution, forensically nuked evidence, ensured all those involved were untouchable with an unprecedented amount of immunity deals, and then lied to the American people about mishandling classified data. Her running mate isn't a person, it's a Constitutional Amendment. The Fifth one to be exact.

And THIS is the person our country has selected to potentially run it, under a electoral system that many believe is somehow still morally sound, totally ethical, Constitutionally legal, and not corrupt in any way.

You were saying about reality checks?

Re:Bullshit defense

[aaarrrgggh]

All it takes is a centralized organization wanting to empower multiple parties to carry out the attack on a local scale. It might be easier to get caught with more people in play, but you aren't talking about some conspiracy of thousands-- 40-50 people might have a substantial impact.

Re:Bullshit defense

[Karl Cocknozzle]

...and that's assuming nobody notices a voter shutting down the machine, opening the case, installing a PCMCIA card, and bringing it back up... Pretty dubious, if you ask me. The level of conspiracy required to give someone enough time to not be detected while doing that would almost require a totally compromised election process to begin with--and if you have that, why bother compromising the machines?

Re:Bullshit defense

[Wycliffe]

How is that a bullshit defense?
I've heard the self-appointed security experts scream about how bad "monocultures" are for security, and Comey basically just said that there isn't a monoculture in the voting systems. That should be a good thing.

Because it would be fairly easy to buy off a few "Marys and Teds" in a few key districts. You likely wouldn't even need to buy them off. Becoming a janitor at the place where the machines are stored would probably be sufficient. Clunky and dispersed is not a security strategy. It does make it slightly harder to coordinate a large scale attack but only slightly. You lose the advantage of doing it all at once but you gain the advantage that each place has it's own security and my guess is that many of these places have almost zero security and just stick the voting machines in the janitor's closet when done.

Re:Bullshit defense

[dywolf]

you still missed the part where its not "the attack" but the "several dozens of different attacks".
40-50 people wouldn't even get you one state.

no, the voting machines simply aren't a practical workable attack vector.

no, I think the best place to try to influence the instead is a single point of failure, say, a single person, easily corruptible.
like say the person who runs the state elections, the state Secretary of State.

and oddly enough, it seems that's exactly what has been done, such as the one in North Carolina purging thousands of voters less than a week before the election without notice, and an appeals process that takes months. similar efforts have occurred in PA, NV, and one really influential such purge occurred in FL in 2000.

I'd worry less about the machines, and more about partisan election officials.

Re:Bullshit defense

[0100010001010011]

The way the election works you don't need to rig it in a massive number of systems. There's no point in rigging an election in Illinois.

Find a battle ground state.

Find a battle ground county.

Flip a small few hundred votes.

Re:Bullshit defense

[jez9999]

Comey is the guy who's come out and said Hillary Clinton is basically innocent of any criminal wrongdoing. You'll forgive me if I don't have too much faith in his opinion.

Re:Bullshit defense

[0100010001010011]

That only works if the state's results is determined by a few hundred votes

See also: Al Gore. Florida. 2000.

Re:Bullshit defense

[Archangel Michael]

He basically said she was "not charged", and incompetent. The problem is, liberals only see that as "innocent" and not the "incompetent" part.

Any sufficient level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. (apologies to Arthur C Clarke)

(NO, I am not voting for Trump either)

Best solution I ever heard

[MikeRT]

Apparently a company in Maryland actually builds these...

1. Paper scantron ballot with a serial number.
2. You press down hard and get a carbon copy of your ballot to take home.
3. When the machine scans the ballot, it scans the serial number and the choice.

If we mandated a system like that, validation would be simple. We'd dump the results into a database on Nov 9th and let people compare their serial # to the data that shows up. Instant voter fraud protection because if your vote mysteriously goes from Clinton to Trump or vice versa, you go to law enforcement and show the carbon copy. At that point, it's all but "guilty until proven innocent" on the data entry side.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[Joe_Dragon]

and your boss can force you to vote their way with that as well.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[CajunArson]

Scantron is fine since it combines a simple, reliable, non-networked and relatively hard to hack scanner at each polling location with easy to read paper ballots as a backup in case of mischief. That combines the basically instantaneous and accurate results of a machine with the

The receipt of who you voted for is a disastrously bad idea though. First of all, there's no way that receipt could ever be used in a recount for obvious chain-of-custody reasons so it doesn't reduce fraud at all. Second of all, it makes it so that a black voter in Philly better show that he voted for Hillary or else -- or that a white voter in rural Alabama better show he voted for Trump or else. Nobody (ok, nobody with any integrity) wants that.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[Anonymous Coward]

*Sigh* - the voting system shouldn't have a receipt you can use to prove who you voted for. This leads to (a) vote selling and (b) coercion. This is a simple basic requirement of the voting system. Please don't make recommendations until you learn the basics.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[Anonymous Coward]

We want a system that doesn't allow for vote selling.

Re: Best solution I ever heard

[CastrTroy]

An abusive spouse who requires proof of who their spouse voted for.

If you're in this sort of relationship, the least of your worries is which of the two candidates becomes the president. It's a terrible thing for anybody that it happens to, but I don't think there's enough to sway the vote one way or the other.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[iamgnat]

Instant voter fraud protection because if your vote mysteriously goes from Clinton to Trump or vice versa

Vote swapping is far from the only type of voter fraud out there and this wouldn't address the others.

It also gives rise to voter intimidation. Currently there is the one copy of the vote and the voter is the only person that actually knows who they voted for. So if someone is intimidating them to vote one way or another, they can still vote as they want and tell the intimidator whatever they want to hear. Add in receipts and not the intimidator can verify that they voted as directed and take action if they didn't. It's no different that the idiots wanting to strike down the laws about taking pictures of your marked ballot.

Re: Best solution I ever heard

[iamgnat]

This is kinda an asinine criticism about electronic voting. There's all sorts of illegal things your boss can do. It's up to you to turn him in to the police, same as you would if he was committing any other federal crime.

Actually it's a very real outcome. Most companies are very easy to figure out how they lean. So with a receipt they will require you to prove you voted by showing it to them. Then while they can't outright terminate you then and there without opening themselves to a legal mess, you can certainly expect to see yourself getting worse jobs, lower bonuses/raises, not getting promotions, higher on the list for layoffs, etc..

That kind of stuff was done before and is what led to all the voter protection laws that we have in place. Take the laws away and we will devolve back to that stuff in fairly short order, especially as long as the political climate remains this contentious and ugly.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[iamgnat]

We already have the ability to do all that anyway. Somebody forces you to use your phone to take a picture. You may counter that taking a picture in a voting place is illegal, but so is vote selling and coercion.

But there are people in the polling place watching for you to be doing something like that. During the primaries I got chewed out by the staff in my polling place because I pulled my phone out to check a text message. So they are (or are supposed to be) watching for that kind of stuff and doing something about about it.

Hell, I vote by mail. How is there any proof my employer or whoever didn't force me to sign up to vote by mail, then supervise me as I filled out my ballot?

Very true and one of the many reasons I disagree with mail in ballots. They serve a valid purpose, but are far too over used by people that were never meant to use them. Counties should have "early" voting stations open for maybe a month or two (and not for just a day or two, the whole time the office is open) prior to the election so that people (who can prove) that won't be there on the actual day can cast their votes. Mail in ballots should only be available for those that can prove that they will not be able to show up on election day or any of the early voting days (e.g. working overseas).

Of course along with that is that they also need to have voting stations (on election day) setup properly so we don't get these ridiculous lines that take hours or worse to get through.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[ghoul]

This would work if instead of giving the receipt to the voter the receipt was put into a ballot box and the ballot boxes stored. If anyone disputes the electronic count as they find it not matching their expectation you file a challenge and the stored ballot boxes are counted manually. This also solves the issue of pushing the wrong button. As the vote is printed out the voter can see they pushed the worng button so they can cancel the vote and do another. Machine will store which votes were cancelled so during the recount the ballot would not be counted even if the voter puts both of the ballots into the box.

You could also get a receipt of the vote without the actual vote on it. You can still use the receipt to check if something suspicious happened but noone can check who you voted for by looking at the receipt.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[ghoul]

I totally disagree with mail in ballots especially for those working overseas. Those working overseas are not affected by the decisions congress makes so they should not have a say in who goes to Congress. Same for mail in ballots. If you cannot be bothered to come to a polling station to vote than you don't care enough for democracy and your vote should not count. Same for old and invalid folks. They are no longer contributing to society so they will only vote for the ones who promise the most free giveaways at the cost of active members of society. We should make voting as hard as possible so people value their democracy. Maybe we should add a 50 question GED test and only if you can answer above 80% does your vote get counted. We could also add a 100 m sprint and a 10 target shooting course and only if you meet the minimum quals your vote counts. So that only those who will be able to fight for the country in times of need will get to decide on what the country does.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[magarity]

You press down hard and get a carbon copy of your ballot to take home.

I don't WANT a carbon copy to take home; so after the revolution the other side finds my old ballots and puts me up against the wall.

I want the electronic voting machine to spit out a receipt summarizing my choices that I can look over and drop in the guarded box on the way out. If fraud/bugs/whatever is suspected in the machine's tally then the election officials can manually add up the papers from the box.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[Archangel Michael]

The receipt can be some soft of salted checksum/encrypted key of your vote. It should be easy for the system to verify that your vote counted without revealing how you voted.

This would solve both problems of verifying your vote counted, and keeping it secret.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[Archangel Michael]

I can only assume you're being sarcastic.

Most of your suggestions are labeled as "discrimination", "Voter intimidation" and "disenfranchisement" of minorities (and why I think you're being sarcastic). But, consider what this message actually says about minorities, that they are INCAPABLE of being educated enough to vote. Let that sink in for a moment.

That is the real racism of low expectations.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[bwashed75]

He cannot force you if this is implemented well. Asking to see reveal a vote should of course be illegal. But more importantly there should be a randomized incentive who should keep their receipt and who should not.

At the voting station at the exit there could be a pick-one-ball-out-of-ten type "lottery" (implemented in any way as long as it's somewhat fair: Roll a dice, bingo machine, pick something with your eyes closed, whatever..). Then if you happened to get the one white ball amongst the nine black you get to keep the receipt, otherwise you throw it in the incinerator/shredder.

The point is you actually only need a small percentage of the receipts to prove if the voting machines are faulty. If you have 100 random receipts from a total of 1000 votes, only 10 votes can be tampered with before you expect tampered votes to show up among the receits. 10% receips will thus "guarantee" a maximum of 1% tampered votes. If you are more paranoid you keep 50% receipts and get a maximum of 2 out of 1000 tampered votes before you expect to find them. (0,2% tampered votes)

In any case you tell your boss you got the black ball and had to shred the receipt.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[JimFive]

We already have the ability to do all that anyway. Somebody forces you to use your phone to take a picture.

And after taking the picture, you spoil your ballot and take it to the election worker to get a new one and vote the way you want.
--
JimFive

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[Altrag]

Its definitely not easy at all:

1) You have to trust that because the system says it counted your vote, that it actually did. OK so that's not TOO tough -- if a full list of voting IDs is posted, you can just count the rows and compare to the total votes.

2) Here's the hard part though: You need to verify that your vote counted for the candidate you selected. That means you have to have something in your possession that can be matched against the posted table. This could be as simple as just directly listing the candidate chosen in the table or it could also be obscured, but even in the latter case your boss could coerce whatever access/verification code you received just as easily as he initially coerced you.

3) And finally, you have to trust that the posted list reflects the actual recorded votes. If the list plainly states the candidates chosen that this is as trivial as #1, but if they're obscured (and I'm assuming they'd be obscured in some non-trivial way,) then each person could verify their own vote but would have no way of counting up the number of votes per candidate. So the posted list could reflect the true votes of every person, and the total votes would still have to match, but there would be no way to verify exactly how many votes that each candidate got -- X+Y = (X+Z)+(Y-Z) for any Z you choose.

There's probably some cryptographic way of solving that as well, but "easy" is not an adjective I would necessarily select -- and none of that stops your boss from coercing your vote (and verifying it afterward if necessary, at least assuming you yourself have the possibility of verifying it.)

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[Altrag]

There is no receipt. You fill in the Scantron form and feed it through the machine. The form is then left with the electioneers so that they can perform a manual recount later if needed.

I of course can't say that its done that way everywhere, but even if there's a receipt to show _that_ you voted, there's no reason for it to indicate who you voted for. You don't have anything you could verify that against later even if you wanted to.

Yes you have to trust the electioneers if a recount is called, but no more than you would in a fully paper-based vote. Well at least assuming that your local organizer isn't an idiot and does something like "used forms get put in a garbage pail out in an unmonitored hallway." But again the same could happen with full-paper votes so you're still not losing any trust there that you would have had otherwise.

Re:Best solution I ever heard

[Altrag]

there are people in the polling place watching for you to be doing something like that

Except that they don't usually get to see into your voting booth so it would be hard for them to tell if you pulled out your phone after the curtain was drawn.

Then again, its also easy enough to tell your boss "sorry they caught me before I could take a picture sucks to be you." (Then again, a boss who's willing to coerce your vote probably wouldn't be opposed to punishing you for acts outside your control whether you were telling the truth or not.)

Worst solution I ever heard

[Zak3056]

"Vote for $CANDIDATE or your daughter has an accident. Bring me your ballot receipt on Tuesday night and we can forget this conversation ever happened."

We have secret ballots for a reason.

Re:Worst solution I ever heard

[Altrag]

Yep. Trouble is that we don't trust electronic voting machines (with some justification to be sure) so we want to be able to verify our vote was recorded (and recorded correctly.) Unfortunately if we can verify our vote, so could whoever was coercing our vote in the first place.

I'm not sure how that can be solved. We trust paper votes not because they're paper but because we have multiple people counting (or at least monitoring the counts) so that the need for trust can be diffused across multiple actors whereas with electronic voting, we have to trust a single entity (the manufacturer of the machine.)

Someone higher up on the thread suggested having multiple independent voting machines which all would get us back to the trust diffusing (albeit at significant hardware and maintenance costs.) Of course, that leads to a potential UI issue since the user isn't going to want to have to record their vote independently on 2 or 3 separate screens, and if you only have one screen then you're back to a single point of trust.

Perhaps N+1 screens -- one shared input screen that works like normal and feeds all of the N independent voting machines, and then each machine would have a display to confirm how they recorded the vote. Sort of like a vote receipt but a) doesn't waste paper and b) doesn't leave a physical receipt that coercive agents could use to verify your vote. A final confirm/reenter prompt and off you go.

All N machines would have to be compromised (and in exactly the same) way in order for vote count fraud to not be detected -- that is you'd be able to spread your trust across 2 or 3 manufacturers instead of a single one.

Re:Worst solution I ever heard

[Zak3056]

Electronic voting does need a receipt, but the receipt needs to be locked in a box and not given to the voter. After the election, you can spot audit the machines with the paper and do full hand recounts if need be.

Re:Worst solution I ever heard

[Altrag]

Well that's kind of the point -- make it so that there isn't a "need be" by spreading the trust across multiple independent (and independently developed) voting machines similar to how you don't lock one person in a room by themselves when they're doing a hand count.

Computers aren't inherently worse than humans at adding -- in fact they're much much better at it. Its all a question of trust and there's no fundamental reason why a hand count by a single person should be trusted any more than an electronic count by a single machine.

We mitigate the issue of misplaced trust in humans by simply not having a single person doing the hand count (plus overseers and whatever else involved.) I'm just suggesting that we could, in principle, do the same thing with the machines and have just as high a level of trust without the need for paper.

Not that I expect that will happen. It would indicate that we don't have faith in the lowest bidder (and that would be unAmerican, no matter how many times companies betray that faith, 'cause capitalism!) And it would require a lot of funds both up front and for ongoing maintenance which I'm sure wouldn't be especially easy to procure when you tell people you need 2-3x the minimum amount you could theoretically get away with in a perfect world.

Mary and what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Comey also made the reassuring point that it's hard to "hack into" America's voting system because "it's so clunky and dispersed. It's Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop at the gym.""

How about some context for this? It reads like a non sequitur. Who are Mary and Fred, what type of machine are they putting in the gym, why does it matter it's under a basketball hoop, what does this have to do with the difficulty of hacking said machine. He's spewing gibberish.

I don't think anyone believes

[Anonymous Coward]

the elections in this country are fair, at this point. It's a system run by corporate and banking interests, posing as a two-party system, talking and walking like it's -- get this -- a democracy.

Machines != Good Vote Counters

[Anonymous Coward]

Public votes should never be counted by machines. Period.

Mechanical, electronic, digital, frickin' VR based over the internet text message simulation. IDGAF.

All machine options are inferior to paper and pencil ballots, counted by volunteers in a public forum.

Human Volunteers
- Cost less
- Are probably more accurate
- Have no technical/mechanical failures
- Are almost impossible to "hack", cheat, etc
- And most importantly are far more trustworthy than these god dam machines.

I love technology, but it has no place in the mathematics classroom or the polling booth.
Voting machines have been nothing but a massive waste of time and money made to satisfy a tech worshiping fetish of people who really don't know how tech works. Just go back to paper and pencil. The Brits get their elections and referenda done in 24 hours mostly. I think Brexit was counted by the next morning.

Re:Machines != Good Vote Counters

[silas_moeckel]

We have people the need the machines languages various disabilities etc etc etc. It's trivial to make a machine that print human readable ballots that can be machine and human tallied. It's very hard to hack that if you assume the humans will actualy check the printed ballot before casting it. Rules that the human readable portion is the one of note is trivial. In the end all of he good parts of machine voting without any of the bad parts.

Re:Machines != Good Vote Counters

[Obfuscant]

Human Volunteers
- Cost less
- Are probably more accurate
- Have no technical/mechanical failures
- Are almost impossible to "hack", cheat, etc
- And most importantly are far more trustworthy than these god dam machines.

My mother used to be a poll worker in a relatively small township in a relatively small county. It was her job to count and monitor the counting of ballots after the poll closed.

She would tell me about the process after she got home. There were regular arguments between the poll workers of opposite parties whether someone had legally marked their ballot for one candidate or another. The law said a cross-mark. "X" or "+". No fill in the box, and no check marks. The latter was to prevent a poll worker from either voting a ballot or ruining one by checking multiple boxes while unfolding or smoothing out the paper. It was too easy to hide a bit of pencil lead under a bandaid on a finger and make all kinds of marks on a ballot as it was being processed. Much harder to make an "X" than a check.

So, no, humans are not more trustworthy or "almost impossible" to hack. The fact that there are supposed to always be two poll workers of opposite parties monitoring the process proves this. You don't need two if one is impossible to hack.

Future statement by FBI Director James Comey...

[Anonymous Coward]

... some months from now, regarding the alleged vote-rigging through hacked voting machines during the 2016 presidential elections:

"Although we did not find clear evidence that Hillary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing federal elections, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in the handling of voting machines...".

Following the above statement, and after riots and protests in the streets, the FBI reopens the investigation, analyzing 650K contested votes in Florida which proved to be decisive for the outcome of the elections. After one week only, the FBI Director releases a new statement confirming that:

"Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed previously, the reasons not to prosecute stand".

And they lived happily and rigged ever after.

They don't

[wiredog]

And this isn't the only make of voting machine used in the US. Large scale voting fraud just isn't possible in the US. Thousands of jurisdictions, potentially unique ballots for each jurisdiction, several different types of voting machines, plus absentee and early voting.

Re:They don't

[ComputerGeek01]

You don't need large scale fraud, you only need to defraud key population centers in a state. Think of how the electoral college works, you have districts broken up geographically and weighted by relative population. Take my state of New York for instance, this place is a solid lock for Hillary but most people don't realize how red it is; because of the overwhelming number of people in NYC we always come up blue in the polls. There are literally millions of people elsewhere in the state that are die hard republicans. Now assume that those people are going to vote red and their district is going to come up for Trump with no need for manipulation. You wouldn't need more than a handful of compromised machines in Buffalo, Rochester and\or NYC to alter a few key districts and flip the entire state for the republican party for the first time since the 80's. People would ask questions sure, but by then you could easily have the few dozen machines you compromised flashed back to their stock firmware, or destroyed in a fire or what ever the hell you wanted. There are enough people who would have actually voted republican who would jump at the chance to defend the results on national television and insert that feeling of reasonable doubt.

You're mistake is in assuming that just because candidates win entire states at a time, that those people in those states must all vote the same way. This is completely incorrect.

Re:They don't

[Zak3056]

1) Corrupt registered voters in each of those population centers;

Law of large numbers. We're talking about millions of people here, some are certain to be enthusiastic participants in such a scheme. The problem is identifying them, and I'd argue the tools for doing so probably exist today.

2) Find a way of hacking the machines in each of those population centers without being caught;

Voting machines are often in booths with a curtain. If the hack takes just a few minutes, it's reasonable that a bad actor could compromise the machine with no one thinking anything is especially odd.

3) Hack the votes in a way that initial diagnostics on election day will not notice the changes;

Tamper after initial diagnostics. Show up early and be in the first 10% of voters.

4) Evade suspicion when the machines return votes that are significantly disproportional to all polling leading up to the vote, and exit polls;

Much more difficult, I agree, but polls have been wrong before. Also, simply spoiling the results of a precinct may be "good enough" (most election laws don't allow for do-overs). Not being affiliated with one of the candidates would also help avoid suspicion/detection.

5) And do this in DOZENS of districts around the country, all without somebody blabbing;

Even harder. Agreed that someone would probably brag. Cutouts and good security would be essential to firewall off the defector and avoid exposing the larger conspiracy. If spoilation were a sufficient outcome, this isn't as big a roadblock as you suggest, though.

6) Do it all under the watchful eye of registered democratic and republican election watchers who are there to ensure fairness and accuracy for "their side" at all of these polling places;

See 2-3 above.

I'll agree that success is unlikely, but it IS possible. If you had a 1/20 chance of success, and sufficient motivation, it's probably good enough odds to attempt performing the operation.

I'll ignore the comment about nerds.

Re:They don't

[Archangel Michael]

Large scale voting fraud just isn't possible in the US

And you know this how? Because the fact is, you can't possibly assure me that there is no large scale fraud, because we have absolutely no way to detect and protect the vote against fraud. Just because you say it, doesn't mean it isn't happening.

My guess, is that fraud is happening in just about every precinct. Which means it is large scale. It may or may not be organized, we wouldn't know. Unless you watch Project Veritas which kinda shows it is organized and large scale.

Re:They don't

[Zak3056]

Again, you're missing the forest for the trees, and display a shocking lack of understanding of the concept of defense in depth. Any one of these items may be relatively easy to do in a vacuum - sure, you can find someone to corrupt. Sure, you can weasel your way into physical access somehow. Sure, you can corrupt the initial boot-up diagnostics review. You *can* do all of those things - but the likelihood of being able to execute these steps in concert, without being caught or found out is *vanishingly* small. It would require incredibly sophisticated planning and coordination, flawless execution, and hundreds of incredibly tight-lipped conspirators. The chances of this are FAR smaller than 1/20. They are probably more on the order of "win the lottery" odds of working to influence the election results.

You gave a list of "why you couldn't"s. I addressed you points with "why you could"s. This is not ignorance of defense in depth--I am not planning a conspiracy here, I am responding to some random dude on the internet. You will note that I actually agreed with you that some of your points were not only non-trivial but quite difficult. You would certainly not have incredibly tight-lipped conspirators--someone is practically guaranteed to talk, if only to brag to their spouse what they'd accomplished if they succeeded. You took my response on that particular point, though, and used it to insult me. WRT odds of success, my 1/20 was not a calculation of the chances of succeeding, but merely stating that if your odds were that good, and if someone were sufficiently motivated, they'd take that chance.

Even if it meant getting caught. "Getting caught" is not a sufficient deterrent to mugging someone, and it sure as shit isn't a significant deterrent to someone who believes your political candidate may as well be the antichrist. People strap themselves with explosives and detonate themselves in crowds, or fly planes into buildings all in the name of making a political statement. Election tampering is tame by comparison.

The comment about nerds was probably the most important part of what I wrote. Shame you skipped it, with your "Cutouts and good security would be essential to firewall off the defector and avoid exposing the larger conspiracy." Maybe you can whip up a Visual Basic GUI to mask your IP address, too.

Unlike CSI technobabble, what I said actually makes sense. It also has jack shit to do with any kind of computer or electronic system. Sorry the words were too big for you, but I assure you that they're perfectly cromulent. I'll make the words simpler:

Zog want steal election. Many cavemen help Zog, but Zog not trust them. Cavemen talky too much. Zog make sure cavemen not know about Zog. Zog make sure cavemen not know each other. If talky caveman in trouble, Zog make sure he only knew about Grog, and Grog know only Ugg. Ugg do ten years standing on head. Ugg take it in ass to Make America Great Again. Zog make sure Ugg only know about Rag just in case.

Was that sufficiently less nerdlike for you?

Re:They don't

[Zak3056]

No, they're not. What you said is just hand-waving wankery designed to make you feel smart because you "thought up a way" that the election could be influenced.

I suggested you needed to keep people who would talk from knowing too much about you. I don't know why that's hand waving wankery, but I'm done feeding the troll.

What is not mentioned in the article. . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Is wireless access to the machines. A machine does not have to be connected to the internet to be hacked remotely. How many of these machines have wireless cards? Then, all a hacker (or insider) needs to do is pull up to the voting location with a laptop that has a wireless connection and all the right passwords and . . . . code adjusted! There are reports of this happening in Virginia when Mitt Romney went up against Ron Paul in 2012. It was a very close election at one precinct that was going up and down between the two candidates up to a certain point. Then all of the sudden near noontime, it quit going up and down but flat-lined to a 60/40 Romney/Paul split for the rest of the day. How likely is that?

Whoever your candidate is, do you really want that kind of voting situation - where you can never be sure who really won? This is what the Bush push for "accurate electronic voting machines," was all about. They no longer wanted it to be possible for a non-insider to be able to win a major or critical election. I suspect if Gore had won, he would have pushed for the same thing. Most Republican and Democrat candidates at the top are usually on the same team, anyway.

Re:Humans != Good Vote Counters

[Overzeetop]

Machines do not make integer mistakes. Humans make them frequently, even when they are not biased. And every human is biased.

Humans can screw up simple integer addition programming -that is true. But, again, it's a human problem not a machine problem.
Humans, when looking at the scale of 100 million operations, are wildly more costly than computers
Humans have a much shorter MTBF than any well engineered machine - and shorter than many poorly engineered machines
Humans are specifically the reason that machines are untrustworthy.

What I do find interesting is that we used the same mechanical machines for 60 years and abandoned them because parts were hard to obtain or expensive, despite there being tens of thousands of them. We replaced them with machines costing 1/4 to 1/2 the amount of new mechanical machines, and just 10 years out are finding that those new machines are so old that their parts (aka OS and other software) are abandoned and/or impossible to maintain. We've spent money on modernization because it seemed so fool proof, and didn't even think about how quickly such technology goes stale.

Paper...

[JasterBobaMereel]

The paper and pencil voting system with manual counting is even more unhackable, and easily verifiable whilst still being anonymous and immune to vote selling ad coercion ...and is used all over the world with no real issues ....

Re:Paper...

[kilfarsnar]

The paper and pencil voting system with manual counting is even more unhackable, and easily verifiable whilst still being anonymous and immune to vote selling ad coercion ...and is used all over the world with no real issues ....

Yes, this is correct. As Stephen Spoonamore says, "Paper ballots, please".

These touch-screen voting machines cannot be trusted. If for no other reason than their code is proprietary. If they can't be independently audited, they can't be trusted. In some cases machines have been observed to flip votes and count backwards. Why would a voting machine need to be able to subtract or process negative numbers? In short, they shouldn't.

Paper ballots, please.

Re:Paper...

[Durrik]

Even if their code was open source, you still can't trust them. Especially if the people rigging the machines is the people who own the machines.

Who is going to be able to verify all the lines of code? Even if you had a million programmers looking at it, something will probably still slip through, after all there are contests every year on making code that looks legit but is actually nefarious.

Who makes the compiler? Can you trust them? Has the code for the compiler been checked into? There's a legend (real or not) that when AT&T was going to commercialize UNIX that they asked the programmers if there were any obvious security holes. Dennis Ritchie spoke up about a backdoor he made in the C compiler. If it noticed it was creating the login program that it would automatically insert code for his username and password so that he'd always have root access. This was not in the login code, but the compiler itself. So you can't trust the compiler.

Are you using signed binaries? Well who signs the binaries and calculates the hash (see the point about the compiler).

What about what downloads the code to the voting machine? Can you trust that?

And that's just the voting machine itself, what about the thing that collects all the results from the voting machines and gives you the final results? Who's checked all that? Do you trust the people doing that? Do all the interested parties trust that?

There are so many points of failure and compromise with this that its scary. Especially when they want to go paperless, with no paper backup, and trusting it all to the machines. Some electronic voting machines are still this way.

The only voting machines that I see being any close to secure are the ones with the cardstock ballot that the voter fills in a line with a black marker to indicate who they are voting for. That can be machine counted for quick results. But to certify the election each ballot should be counted by a human official, with the concerned parties watching. That way if the vote can be called into question the ballots can be looked at.

Machine counted for initial (fast) results, Human counted with observers for certified results. In the case of US elections that would be at least 3 people counting each ballot: one independent election official, one republican and one democrat.

Re:Paper...

[Trailer Trash]

The paper and pencil voting system with manual counting is even more unhackable, and easily verifiable whilst still being anonymous and immune to vote selling ad coercion ...and is used all over the world with no real issues ....

Agreed. And in most of the rest of the world they require 1) a photo ID and 2) dye a finger. Put all that together and elections are are pretty easy to do. It's odd that there's one party that is against common-sense voting laws.

Re:Paper...

[Mitreya]

The paper and pencil voting system with manual counting is even more unhackable, and easily verifiable whilst still being anonymous and immune to vote selling ad coercion ...

But you cannot sell expensive machines at a large markup if you used reliable paper-and-pencil voting.

Re:Paper...

[sbaker]

The "dye a finger" thing has some concerns. In some elections, you really want a certain class of person to just not vote. The dyed finger is proof that you voted - and it's hard to wash off (intentionally, obviously). So the bad guy can threaten to beat the crap out of people who voted and still gain an edge. This isn't a theoretical problem.

Of course, you can achieve a similar effect by simply hanging out outside the voting location and noting which people went inside.

But the easier you make it, the more chance of abuse.

Re:Paper...

[kilfarsnar]

Yep, I agree with all of this. I just didn't want to go that deep in my post.

Re:Paper...

[BenBoy]

This! Pushing electronic voting is inexplicable unless you're either in sales for voting machines or want riggable elections. And if it's the latter, better hope you're the only party interested in doing the rigging. I'm a big fan, btw, of broken-arrow ballots

Re:Paper...

[Trailer Trash]

And if you don't do it you end up with a van, a bunch of homeless people, and free cigarettes while they're driven around to various polling places to vote in the stead of dead people (who tend to lean strongly Democrat).

Re:Trump ask Putin for help securing the vote

[gsslay]

If surveillance is peace, then Trump could build new relations with Russia by giving them access to all the domestic surveillance data to show we have nothing to hide.

I just choked on my sandwich. Is this a comedy routine you're putting together? Because that's hilarious. You should suggest that to Trump immediately, it is stupid enough for his next speech.

Boring

[zifn4b]

How about an article on hacking an election? Oh wait that's what politicians normally do. No news there.

Coins for Hillary

[Geoffrey.landis]

This woman won 6 of 6 coin tosses to beat Bernie in Iowa.

That is incorrect information that was pushed by the media in initial frenzy of reporting, but completely debunked. Here's the Iowa Register story, which I would the most accurate source for information in Iowa: http://www.desmoinesregister.c...

According to the Register, the report of Hillary winning six coin flips came from social media. Of the seven coin flips to break ties that were actually officially reported through the voting app, Sanders won six, and Clinton one. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/02/...

Here's a more interesting question: since Clinton did not in fact win a majority of coin tosses, what are the statistical chances that coin flips that happened to get reported in on social media would suggest that she did?

Another link: http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

Modifies the public and protective counter? *FAIL*

[davide marney]

Geez, it's like no one ever thought of protecting the counters by making a hand-written backup of those numbers after the machines have been certified, but before voting begins.

I am a volunteer poll worker in Virginia. Not only do we record in pen those numbers when we open the equipment, we do a running comparison of the public counter totals to the total number of people who were checked-in on the poll books, every hour. If those numbers are off by even 1, it is a major event, we have to make an immediate report by phone to the registrar, write up what happened on an audit log, and explain it again to the local Board of Elections that evening.

You go messing with those numbers, and you would be caught within the hour in Virginia. Nice try.

Secret ballot is important

[Geoffrey.landis]

An abusive spouse is just one of thousands of scenarios of voting coercion.

The U.S. adopted secret ballots for a reason: to make it harder to implement vote buying and coercion. Maybe you're thinking that in modern times when everybody is trustworthy and nobody had bad motives, we don't need this safeguard.
But nevertheless, there is a reason for the secret ballot, and we shouldn't undermine it.

Re:Secret ballot is important

[CastrTroy]

I've very much in support of the secret ballot, but I don't see spousal coercion being a relevant argument about why we should keep the secret ballot. I'm much more worried about the current government in power being able to determine who I vote for for than other individual entities like my boss or my spouse. Things like that have a much more likely scenario of changing the result.

The elections have been rigged for decades

[p51d007]

People are still under the belief, that the people are electing the president. Good grief...wake up people...until the American public march on DC and take back government, nothing will change. We have the "Bush" bunch, the "Clinton" bunch, senators that have been in office since the 60's, judges that have to wear diapers. Whenever I hear a politician say "I have devoted my career to public service" I just want to PUKE. Political office was NEVER to be a lifetime job. But, we the people are responsible for sending these clowns back year after year. I stopped voting for ANYONE that has been in a government position more than 2 terms years ago. I don't care if they are the best person in the world, two terms is enough!

Re:The elections have been rigged for decades

[Altrag]

The presidency might be the big flashy one, but all of these discussions apply equally to state governors, city mayors, and any other elected official at any level of government.

Not to mention issue votes. I imagine the pro-lifers wouldn't be too off-put if they were given the ability to tamper with any vote related to abortion laws for example.

Re:Examples needed

[Pascoea]

I'm confused. I read the linked e-mail. It's a bunch of quotes from Republicans raising concerns about Trump's attitude, interactions, and policy proposals. How is this an effort to "stir up world peace" by the Dems? Every quote in that e-mail is from a Republican.

Universal Hack

[sbaker]

So to pull this off you need (a) a voting machine to play with to learn the techniques and (b) physical access to every voting machine you need to influence.

My approach is to make a completely fake voting machine, with the same interfaces as the real thing - and just swap the whole machine out when I have physical access to it.

This thought-experiment shows that with those two things (a machine to play with and physical access) there is no conceivable security measure that'll be 100% effective. So control access to the physical machines and your problem is solved.

Re:Thank you for correcting the record.

[Geoffrey.landis]

Thank you for correcting the record.

You're welcome.

Did you read the leaks where the rest of the Clinton staff scorns CTR?

I don't particularly care about the campaign's click-through rate (CTR).

Re:many different vectors of attack

[bobbied]

True, but Bush/Gore vote count in FL aside, how many elections are really that close? MOST elections don't even require counting the absentee ballots to know who won. As much as some would like to cast our election vote counting processes in to doubt, there really isn't an issue.

Vote fraud still needs to be looked for and dealt with strictly when found, regardless of if it affected the outcome, but those who trot out voter fraud as a reason somebody won or lost really don't have a case in the vast majority of the cases.

Re:Modifies the public and protective counter? *FA

[sbaker]

So if someone shows up, checks in, then doesn't actually vote...it throws you into chaos? I think that's something you might not want to advertise too widely!

Re:Why not use the 'Robinson Method'?

[Lanforod]

The scales become the target.

Re:Modifies the public and protective counter? *FA

[turp182]

Thanks for the info. Let's go a bit deeper.

Say the totals don't match by a couple. What happens to the votes from that particular machine (or the polling place in general)?

Could these type of activities be used not to alter the results of an election, but for disruption?

Don't Panic!

[easyTree]

As we've seen over the past year, everyone involved in the election is of unimpeachable character so nothing untoward will occur :P

Just vote by mail like the West does

[WillAffleckUW]

There, problem solved.

And stop making voting machines accessible to the Internet.

Re:many different vectors of attack

[Archangel Michael]

it is virtually impossible to get a "hanging chad" while voting properly, with a single ballot. Both sides knew it, but didn't want their little secrets exposed, since both sides were culpable. Which is why we got the theater of inspectors looking at the ballots trying to determine "intention" of the voter, based on a Hanging Chad.

Florida was exposure of the fraud, it is just that too few people actually recognized it for what it was.

app

[Geoffrey.landis]

A statement from social media is wrong, here, the proof is in another candidate's social media app!

Uh, no.

The "app" mentioned in the article is the Microsoft app used to report precinct results to the state office; it had nothing to do with social media. This was deployed by the Iowa Caucus (and used by both Republican and Democratic caucus, for what it's worth), but only used by about half the precincts (the other half just phoned the results in)

The app, from what people say, was slow and crashed a lot, but don't blame the results on the app-- the app was just the means used to report results.

security by obscurity approach to voting

[Geoffrey.landis]

You just proposed the "security by obscurity" approach to voting machine security.

You said it's hard for you to know what the security-- if any-- is for the physical location of voting machines, and since you don't know how to find out, that means they're secure!

Note that you haven't pointed to any reason to think at all that this information is being kept secret-- you just stated that you don't know, and therefore since you don't know, you "guess" that only a handful of people know.

Re:security by obscurity approach to voting

[apoc.famine]

Security through obscurity doesn't work when the attacker can anonymously probe the security. Security through obscurity works quite well when you have to show your face to figure out the security. Sure, I could try to figure out where they keep the voting machines. But it would be really hard to do that discretely. Unlike a piece of hardware I could buy and tear down, or some software I could sandbox and probe, physical security really does stand up to security through obscurity.
 
Tell me: When you hop the fence into the Rose Garden, how long do you have to reach a door to the White House?
 
You don't know, and neither do I. And that's a fucking deterrent for everyone but someone mentally handicapped. Yes, you could send someone else to probe that, and observe the result, but that raises the alarm, and security heightens.

Note that you haven't pointed to any reason to think at all that this information is being kept secret....

And you haven't given any reason to think it's readily available. I think your mission impossible script is a bit shit, and you think it's possible. If that's the case, pick a city, do the research, and lay out how easy it would be. If you can do that, you're on tap for either Gitmo or an award.

Re:many different vectors of attack

[bobbied]

Which is why Bush went to court to stop the recounts... And Why the courts eventually agreed and rightly put a stop to all the foolishness... AND why they have electronic voting machines now.

Legally, Bush got FL's electors the moment FL's Secretary of State state certified the results, which was days before the courts got involved and the media frenzy hit full stride with their under vote, over vote, and dimpled chad stupidity. What amazed me was how many courts let the garbage continue, despite the clear meaning and intention of the law which all parties agreed to before the first vote was cast which showed Bush as the winner.

Let's spread some more FUD, why don't we?

[filesiteguy]

Man, seems like everyone is wanting to spread FUD on elections items.

Let's see, OH, yes, Wired ran a guide yesterday to how to rig an election in 10,000 easy steps:

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/wireds-totally-legit-guide-rigging-presidential-election/?mbid=social_twitter

Way easier just to pay off your special interest groups.

Let me show you...

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

...how easy it is to hack a person taking votes. A few hundred dollar bills and 2 minutes is all it takes.

FTA

[PatientZero]

If readers are worried that the Cylance research spells some kind of doom, don't. US officials have already explained that attacks on the actual voting machines are almost impossible, and not something they fear. If they happen, they'll occur in one or two isolated precints, but not in a coordinated nation-wide attack.

reversal of burden of proof

[Geoffrey.landis]

Your comments, over and over, can be summarize to this: "I don't know fact X, therefore fact X is hard to find out."

You have never actually tried to find out where voting machines are stored. You don't know whether it's hard or not. Saying that the information is hard to get is a logical fallacy known as "argument from ignorance."

...

Note that you haven't pointed to any reason to think at all that this information is being kept secret....

And you haven't given any reason to think it's readily available.

So, if you don't know whether the system is secure-- and you repeat several times that you don't know-- is the conclusion "therefore it is secure" justified?

(In any case, the best you can say about your argument that security by obscurity works is that breaking the security might need an inside man.)

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[Instituto Santa Cata]

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