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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 Blymie on Thursday November 15 2018, @09:28PM (2 children)
Interesting. We just vote for the party rep here.
From our viewpoint, you're hiring the person to manage / run the government. Their job, is to become intimately familiar with "many things", and vote/decide those things.
People don't have time to investigate and decide on 100 people, in depth, per election. It's hard enough to read a complete policy / stance from a few candidates, to listen to their speeches, and so on.
So .. spend time concentration on election the *right person* (note I didn't say party) to do the job, and they can handle all the little things.
Regardless, there are loads of ways to handle this. One way, is to have separate ballots (which go into separate sealed boxes), which are then counted by different groups of party representatives. Make it easy to have a separate set of individuals count, whilst still maintaining an auditable trail.
It really isn't hard. You work out a system to count efficiently and fast, and then you use that same system -- forever, with minor improvements here an there.
Election counting isn't "sexy". It doesn't need to be "revamped" or "modernized". It needs to be effective, simple, and something that anyone can understand.
Counting machines are black boxes. They should be disallowed.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Saturday November 17 2018, @02:36AM (1 child)
Yeah, that's how much of the world does it. But not the US, here the voters micromanage that stuff. Party power is way more fragmented, which can be good or bad, depending on the circumstances. And details vary wildly over 50 states, some jobs may be elected (sometimes "nonpartisan", without any party identification or endorsement), sometimes they're appointed. And you're right that voters often don't know much about more than a handful of the candidates/offices being filled.
That won't work if you're having 45 simultaneous elections. You can't give a voter 45 ballots and expect stuff to get into the correct sealed box, and there aren't enough party reps to oversee the counting. But, OCR ballots solve a lot of that, and maintains an audit trail. 10 years ago, we had a statewide election that required a hand recount. Out of a total of about 3M votes, the hand count was within about 500 votes of the machine count (some of that was due not to miscounting, but disputes about whether particular ballots were valid).
We don't really need to know results immediately (it'll be months before any of the candidates takes office, and at least weeks before the results are certified), but the demand for instant gratification is strong.
(Score: 2) by Blymie on Saturday November 17 2018, @04:23AM
Instant gratification is helpful in this case, I think.
I didn't mean separate ballots for each. You can have 3 ballots. Whatever is required to split up counting, and make it easier.
I recently posted a link to the Florida recount, by hand, and done in a few hours.... showing how easily it can be done.