DEFCON Conference To Target Voting Machines (politico.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Hackers will target American voting machines -- as a public service, to prove how vulnerable they are. When over 25,000 of them descend on Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas at the end of July for DEFCON, the world's largest hacking conference, organizers are planning to have waiting what they call "a village" of different opportunities to test how easily voting machines can be manipulated. Some will let people go after the network software remotely, some will be broken apart to let people dig into the hardware, and some will be set up to see how a prepared hacker could fiddle with individual machines on site in a polling place through a combination of physical and virtual attacks. With all the attention on Russia's apparent attempts to meddle in American elections -- former President Barack Obama and aides have made many accusations toward Moscow, but insisted that there's no evidence of actual vote tampering -- voting machines were an obvious next target, said DEFCON founder Jeff Moss.

Comments

Re:It's the voters, stupid!

[vtcodger]

"There are many other reasons for counting votes the "traditional" way, secure machines or not."

There are other alternatives as well. For example the town I live in uses paper ballots, but counts them with OCR -- which allows for a quick total when the polls close, but still allows a recount if a problem in a miscount is suspected.

BTW, about 30 years ago, the town had a substantial number of blank ballots vanish on election day. Everyone is pretty sure they didn't end up in the vote count, but to this day no one knows where they went. if indeed they ever existed. It's remotely possible that the print run was somehow miscounted.