Virginia's State Board of Elections has decided its current generation of electronic voting machines is potentially vulnerable, and wants them replaced in time for the gubernatorial election due on November 7th, 2017.
The decision was announced in the minutes of the Board's September 8th meeting: "The Department of Elections officially recommends that the State Board of Elections decertify all Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or touchscreen) voting equipment."
In addition to the "current security environment", the report cites the DefCon demonstration in July that showed how quickly DRE voting systems could be pwned.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/11/virginia_to_scrap_touchscreen_voting_machines/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by leftover on Wednesday September 13 2017, @03:05PM (1 child)
They will struggle to get enough paper ballots printed by then. Scrapping the machines was obviously the correct decision. July 31 would have been a better day to make it.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @05:57PM
It's actually not that bad, the company that I work for prints ballots for my state and a few others and we just started printing this month. The choice to go paper only so late probably means the company that handles the printing won't get started for a few weeks, but a larger company than mine ought to be able to handle the work load. I mean, rough math, if the print company has 1 printer that can print 300 sheets a minute (we have a Canon i300 that can) and they need to print 8.412 million ballots (1 ballot per person in Virginia regardless of age), they would need a little over 58 8 hour shifts of continuous printing or 2 shifts a day, ~29 days to complete the job. They'd likely have more than one printer going at a time so it would be less than that.