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Voting Machine Manual Instructed Election Officials To Use Weak Passwords (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An election security expert who has done risk-assessments in several states since 2016 recently found a reference manual that appears to have been created by one voting machine vendor for county election officials and that lists critical usernames and passwords for the vendor's tabulation system. The passwords, including a system administrator and root password, are trivial and easy to crack, including one composed from the vendor's name. And although the document indicates that customers will be prompted periodically by the system to change the passwords, the document instructs customers to re-use passwords in some cases -- alternating between two of them -- and in other cases to simply change a number appended to the end of some passwords to change them.

The vendor, California-based Unisyn Voting Solutions, makes an optical-scan system called OpenElect Voting System for use in both precincts and central election offices. The passwords in the manual appear to be for the Open Elect Central Suite, the backend election-management system used to create election definition files for each voting machine before every election -- the files that tell the machine how to apportion votes based on the marks voters make on a ballot. The suite also tabulates votes collected from all of a county's Unisyn optical scan systems. The credentials listed in the manual include usernames and passwords for the initial log-in to the system as well as credentials to log into the client software used to tabulate and store official election results.

4 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Unity? by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Paper ballot

    That's how we do it here in California, which has the fairest and most secure elections in the country.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  2. Re:Unity? by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Informative

    The issue is we ignore the next two, which are just as important. One out of three doesn't cut it...

    Oh, we have all three. When I registered to vote earlier this year, I had to show proof of my citizenship and a photo ID, and we have vote-by-mail that you don't have to be "absent" to use.

    By the way, the states that experts have ranked as the worst for electoral integrity are Arizona, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Tennessee. Also, Texas, Georgia and South Carolina rank pretty low.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  3. Re:For the record by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Informative

    T wasn't blaming the "rigging" on Russia, but on Democrats/illegals. It was T's burden to show evidence for them doing such.

    I suppose if you claim everything is rigged/bugged/fake, you'll accidentally be right roughly 10% of the time in a general sense.

  4. Re:Reasoning by DethLok · · Score: 4, Informative

    in Australia (apparently a nazi country since we have govt regulation of business, gun control, national healthcare?) we also have the Electoral commission.

    They run the voting system.

    Everyone votes the same way, on paper.

    They hire extra staff from existing public service agencies, experienced & arguably trustworthy govt workers.

    Voting is too important to let states or cities make up their own rules, or to let just anyone work in the polls.

    And boy, am I curious to see the results and hysteria of these US midterm elections, it is going to make Bush vs Gore look like a couple of toddlers fighting over a toy!