DEF CON Report: “Grave and Undeniable” Security Issues with Electronic Voting Systems
October 1st, 2018Via: Ars Technica:
Today, six prominent information-security experts who took part in DEF CON’s Voting Village in Las Vegas last month issued a report on vulnerabilities they had discovered in voting equipment and related computer systems. One vulnerability they discovered—in a high-speed vote-tabulating system used to count votes for entire counties in 23 states—could allow an attacker to remotely hijack the system over a network and alter the vote count, changing results for large blocks of voters. “Hacking just one of these machines could enable an attacker to flip the Electoral College and determine the outcome of a presidential election,” the authors of the report warned.
…
The report authors…documented dozens of other severe vulnerabilities found in voting systems. They found that four major areas of “grave and undeniable” concern need to be addressed urgently. One of the most critical is the lack of any sort of supply-chain security for voting machines—there is no way to test the machines to see if they are trustworthy or if their components have been modified.
It should be a “no-bull” statement by now that a single, nation-wide system of hand-counted paper ballots are the way to go for honest elections. One big reason we have this clunky patchwork of different voting systems in the USA is because election-tampering is as American as apple pie, and our political class has no interest in adopting a simple reform that would make such tampering a lot more difficult.