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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: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:46PM (6 children)
I like what my precinct does: box, paper, machine counting, and option of as many manual counts as desired.
You get a paper ballot. Fill it out with a pen. They put it in a machine which counts it before dropping it visibly into a cardboard box. A display on the machine increments showing total ballots counted, so you know yours was.
The Voter doesn't have to worry that the machine counts some mysterious bar codes, hanging chads, hole punches or other non-human readable marking. The machine counts exactly what a human sees and fills out with a pen. In a manual count, they should get exactly the same result. It would even be possible to take the entire box of ballots and feed them through a 2nd counting machine to check the results. Or, if necessary, manually count them. Or manually count a statistical sampling.
No hanging chads. No holes punched.
If there are any defects in the ballot or the way it is marked, the machine rejects it immediately without counting, and you can fill out another ballot.
The box of ballots is the actual record. The machine count is merely for speed and convenience.
It would be possible to announce preliminary results on election night, with an actual human count done in the following days to be the actual official result.
This seems to me to have the best attributes of completely manual paper voting with the speed of machine counted results.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday November 15 2018, @04:10PM (3 children)
Statistical samples are of dubious value though, especially when elections are close. And all the other things that *could* be done, are only of value if they *are* done. Which they rarely are.
And if the manual counting is the official result, then what exactly is the point of having an early result election night? There is literally no benefit to anyone, except the media outlets and their ability to sell ads. Elections are not sports games - the final result is the ONLY thing that matters, except insofar as preliminary results may compromise the election by encouraging or discouraging voters from going to the polls.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday November 15 2018, @06:25PM (2 children)
Yep, with close results, do full recounts.
The machine count provides the election night results that everyone so desperately wants and needs.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 16 2018, @02:26AM (1 child)
It's that "desperately wants and needs" bit that I don't get. It's not going to make any real difference to anyone until the winners take office months in the future. As far as I can tell the only reason we desperately want fake (inaccurate? non-definitive?) results right away is because the media has turned the whole thing into a circus to boost ad revenues.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 16 2018, @02:56AM
On election night, the losers desperately need the turds, so that they can start polishing them.
Seriously, everyone wants to know the results ASAP. At the same time, everyone realizes that the early results can sometimes be wrong. The closer the results are, the more likely that they are wrong. That's why even the less honest polling places only offer percentages. "We're more than ninety percent certain that Candidate A has won." We might hear certainties offered in some precincts, but I don't recall hearing very many of those. If there were only 1000 eligible voters, and there were 800 votes for Candidate A, then the results can hardly be contested. If they were, it would only be a sign of a sore loser trying to make things difficult for everyone. In reality, few elections are so clearly decided. We are accustomed to the winner taking as little as 45% of the vote, the loser getting as much as 44% of the vote, and third parties dividing the rest.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday November 15 2018, @04:25PM (1 child)
They should always be verified with manual counting, or at least a significative number of machines should be checked if they have counted properly. Do you remember the voting machines of USA 2000 presidential election in Florida [wikipedia.org]? Do you check Credit Card Payments? Do you count money form a cash machine? I always do it. There are two actor and all those gadgets let an actor (the bank) speed up process (teller machine, bank software...), but the other actor (you) can verify it. With electronic voting, you drop the ballot in a vacuum. And with this machines if you don't count manually ballots, just count them again in the same machine, is not very different. Think of Volskwagen dieselgate [wikipedia.org], considering what is in stake in a election, and that someone always to tamper it. It is a good idea manipulating the circuits to move 10% votes from others candidates to me when dumping totals.
Voting machines could be even connected to internet, so, a second after finishing elections, you could have *provisional* results, but always pending of manual counting. Never trust in machine
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday November 15 2018, @06:29PM
You mention something that I failed to mention.
The voting machines I talk about are NOT connected to the internet. Ever. They don't need to be.
The results can be sent by a human over the internet or some other way.
Another thing about passing the ballots through multiple machines to verify the count would the the idea of multiple machines from different vendors that might not be implemented the same way.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.