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I Bought Used Voting Machines on eBay for $100 Apiece. What I Found Was Alarming
In 2016, I bought two voting machines online for less than $100 apiece. I didn't even have to search the dark web. I found them on eBay.
Surely, I thought, these machines would have strict guidelines for lifecycle control like other sensitive equipment, like medical devices. I was wrong. I was able to purchase a pair of direct-recording electronic voting machines and have them delivered to my home in just a few days. I did this again just a few months ago. Alarmingly, they are still available to buy online.
If getting voting machines delivered to my door was shockingly easy, getting inside them proved to be simpler still. The tamper-proof screws didn't work, all the computing equipment was still intact, and the hard drives had not been wiped. The information I found on the drives, including candidates, precincts, and the number of votes cast on the machine, were not encrypted. Worse, the "Property Of" government labels were still attached, meaning someone had sold government property filled with voter information and location data online, at a low cost, with no consequences. It would be the equivalent of buying a surplus police car with the logos still on it.
[...] I reverse-engineered the machines to understand how they could be manipulated. After removing the internal hard drive, I was able to access the file structure and operating system. Since the machines were not wiped after they were used in the 2012 presidential election, I got a great deal of insight into how the machines store the votes that were cast on them. Within hours, I was able to change the candidates' names to be that of anyone I wanted. When the machine printed out the official record for the votes that were cast, it showed that the candidate's name I invented had received the most votes on that particular machine.
This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines—those that were used in the 2016 election—are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as "next generation," and still in use today, are worse than they were before—dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday November 15 2018, @09:08PM (4 children)
I'll mention it again here, but you don't need scantron machines either. It could be aluminum punch outs. Insert a blank aluminum sheet into the machine, choose your votes, then watch it be printed onto the aluminum, punch outs created, and then ejected back to the voter for their own verification. That's who should be verifying it anyways, the voter. Once verified, they slip it back into the machine, and it gets cut into notched squares, which can still be verified all over again.
Once you have your aluminum squares, it could be a physical stacking of them. Just like those toys for toddlers that only allow the right block into the right hole, only the correctly voted square can fit onto a candidates stack. That should be work that anybody can do at a polling location. It's worth mentioning how anybody around the stack can visually inspect it for accuracy, and vote tampering would be a hilariously laborious affair.
It's all recyclable, just like paper.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 16 2018, @02:51AM (3 children)
Surely. Sounds a bit expensive, but there's lots of ways to implement the ballot-casting process if counting speed is considered important for some reason. Just stay away from computers, the security technology is still nowhere near mature enough to be trusted for something so tempting to corrupt.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 16 2018, @12:36PM (2 children)
A scantron, aside from the light sensor magic, is little more computationally advanced than 1930s unit record equipment.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 16 2018, @02:57PM (1 child)
Are you certain about that? I'm sure they originally were, but these days programmable computers/SOCs have gotten so cheap that they've pretty much replaced anything that would otherwise require purpose-built electronics.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 16 2018, @09:45PM
Strange but interesting thought experiment... mandate elections use 1930s unit record equipment or new models. Not the craziest idea ever.