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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: 3, Informative) by Blymie on Friday November 16 2018, @04:21AM
These sorts of things were worked out a century ago. For example here?
You may only vote at your assigned voting station. You get informed before the election... a card comes that says "You are registered at this address!". If you don't receive a card, you call.. ads are in papers, everywhere to do so.
If you call, you can change your address, your polling station, whatever.
But you get ONE polling station. Why do you need to vote 1000 miles away? Advanced polling is available for those traveling during the day.
Really.. it's all been worked out. Every contingent. And in terms of expensive? Come on! This is *one night*, and this is *democracy* we're talking about. You do *not* *ever* cut corners!!
For example, each party has representatives monitoring and observing the count. And methods to count efficiently by hand have been used for centuries.
You're acting like counting by hand is *new*. No! Counting by hand is the tried and true method! The method that has worked, that has been fine tuned and honed!
Here? The polls close, and 2 hours after they are counted. Really.
One thing we have is sealed, official ballot boxes. Those boxes are transported under guard to the counting area. Again with party reps if desired, monitoring. And each box is tamper proof, on and on and on.
So the count starts while people are still voting! It's not like everyone votes 5 minutes before the polls close.