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Software To Capture Votes in Upcoming National Election is Insecure (vice.com)
Hackers could have manipulated the results of the upcoming election in Germany by using "trivial" attacks against a program used to count and transmit voting results, researchers warned on Thursday. From a report: White hat hackers from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), a well-known hacking organization in Germany, claim to have found a series of serious vulnerabilities in PC-Wahl 10, software used by German authorities to count and transmit voting results. The researchers said their attacks show the software is in a "sad state" and that malicious hackers could have compromised it with "one click." "The amount of vulnerabilities and their severity exceeded our worst expectations," Linus Neumann, one of the researchers who conducted the study, said in a press release. The good news, however, is that the researchers believe it would have been hard for malicious hackers to get away with such attacks during the upcoming German election on September 24 without anyone noticing. "Technically, manipulation would be possible in several ways, but it is unlikely that manipulation would remain undetected," Thorsten Schroder, another researcher involved in the study, wrote in an op-ed for the magazine Der Spiegel.
Sure it will take longer to count votes with people instead of software, but I'm fine with that. I'd rather it take hours for paper ballots to be counted than have the possibly of government officials or hackers corrupting the voting system. Politicians will bend over backwards to stay in power, giving them an easy way to manipulate votes in their favor makes me uneasy.
So far here in Alberta all federal and provincial elections I've participated in have used paper-based voting systems and been counted by hand (AFAIK), hopefully it stays this way.