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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 Runaway1956 on Friday November 16 2018, @02:36AM (1 child)
If every one of those elections is hotly contested, then it will be a rather large task to settle each one. But, that being the case would indicate that your local election officials may be doing something wrong.
In all likelihood, one or two of the results would be contested, and have to be recounted. The more contested counts, the more likely that your officials are corrupt.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Saturday November 17 2018, @02:12AM
I assume you mean, the results are contested after the election. That's fairly rare. None of the races on my ballot this year, though if they all had to be hand counted that would be a massive headache. Occasionally one or two races will be close enough (within 0.5%) to require a recount.
Yes, that would indicate some systemic problem, whether corruption or massive incompetence. Elections are pretty clean where I am, at least the mechanics of their administration (as opposed to the advertising and occasional threats). (Disclaimer: I am an extremely minor election "official", that is, one of the people who staffs the polls.)