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Another item from Def Con 26, which ended the other day, an 11-year-old was easily able to change tallies on real electronic voting equipment within minutes. These machines are designed not to leave any evidence when tampering happens so it was useful that there were many witnesses present for her demo.
Election hackers [sic] have spent years trying to bring attention to flaws in election equipment. But with the world finally watching at DEFCON, the world's largest hacker conference, they have a new struggle: pointing out flaws without causing the public to doubt that their vote will count.
This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers [sic] find creative and alarming ways to break in. Last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines and a single e-poll book of registered voters over the course of the weekend, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year's Voting Village was bigger in every way, with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the US.
In a room set aside for kid hackers [sic], an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state's website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.
Earlier on SN:
Georgia Defends Voting System Despite 243-Percent Turnout in One Precinct
South Carolina's 13k Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable, Unreliable
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:54PM
Think of the situation from the point of view with someone with real power. For that person, the ideal election:
1. Appears to be completely legitimate and reflect the will of the people.
2. Guarantees that you (your party, your favorite pet politician, yourself if you are a politician, etc) win.
That both gives you all the appearances needed to say "Yes, I speak for We The People", while at the same time ensuring that you don't have to govern based on what those pesky voters actually want.
A voting system that can easily have the results changed is perfect for this, so long as it doesn't appear to most people like the results actually were changed. There have been hints that such things have happened before, e.g. suspiciously large differences between exit polls and election results in 2004 in a number of states. So far, though, these issues haven't entered the popular zeitgeist to the point where everyone assumes the election is a complete sham like they do in many poorer countries.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.