The news organization NPR (National Public Radio) has officially joined in on the discussion of voter machine hacking/corruption. Election fraud has been on the minds of millions for centuries, but after the shocking and allegedly illegitimate win of Donald Trump on November 8, 2016 and the proven of Russian interference, the voters are becoming more and more concerned. Then, during a time of a historically high citizen involvement and “resistance” and a historically low approval ratings for a Republican U.S. president, Democrats have somehow also lost four special elections. Many have their own opinions and/or theories as to the reason for the losses, but no one knows for sure and voting machine corruption is very much on the table.
Pam Fessler with NPR writes:
As new reports emerge about Russian-backed attempts to hack state and local election systems, U.S. officials are increasingly worried about how vulnerable American elections really are. While the officials say they see no evidence that any votes were tampered with, no one knows for sure.
Fessler says voters were repeatedly assured last year that our votes were not manipulated by foreign hackers because “with few exceptions” voting machines are not connected to the Internet. Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler asked not long before the 2016 elections: “So how do you hack something in cyberspace, when it’s not in cyberspace?” Fessler cites cybersecurity expert Jeremy Epstein who says voting machines are connected to something— that is connected to something—that’s connected to the Internet and thus proving the point that voting machines are, indeed, connected to the internet.
A recently leaked National Security Agency report on Russian hacking attempts has heightened concerns. According to the report, Russian intelligence services broke into an election software vendor’s computer system and used the information it gained to send 122 election officials fake emails infected with malicious software. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Russia might have attempted to hack into election systems in up to 39 states.
Alex Halderman who is a computer scientist at the University of Michigan says before every election, “voting machines have to be programmed with the design of the ballots — what are the races, which are the candidates.” He adds that the programming is usually done on central office computers by outside vendors. “The ballot program is then installed on individual voting machines with a removable memory card.”
“So as a remote attacker, I can target an election management system, one of these ballot programming computers. If I can infect it with malicious software, I can have that malicious software spread to the individual machines on the memory cards, and then change votes on Election Day,” says Halderman.
There’s no evidence that any of this happened in last year’s election. But Halderman notes that some, or all, electronic voting machines in 14 states have no paper ballot backups that can be checked to make sure the electronic results are correct.
Many election officials claim such an attack would be nearly impossible because of the imposed security measures. But on Monday, Connecticut Election Director Peggy Reeves told a panel on National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that many local election officials are “ill-equipped to handle cybersecurity threats.”
“Many of our towns actually have no local IT support,” she said. “Seriously, they don’t have an IT director in their town. They might have a consultant that they call on if they have an issue. So they look to us, but we’re a pretty small division.”
Reeves said the advantage we have against voter hacking is “probably the fact that the nation’s voting system is so decentralized, with different processes and equipment used in thousands of different locations.” Some experts like Larry Norden, who deal with election technology at the Brennan Center, agrees with Reeves, but Norden is “worried that hackers were laying the groundwork for more serious attacks when they probed voter registration databases, as Russia is accused of doing.” Norden adds voting machine hacking is a real threat and it’s not going away. He adds, “If anything, foreign adversaries, even people at home, might be emboldened to do this more going forward. And to me it is a real call that we have to do more as soon as possible to secure these systems.”
Fessler concludes saying most experts she’s come across believe the best solution is to make sure all voting machines have paper records to back up the electronic results. She adds that the experts say audits should be conducted after every election “to make sure the electronic results match the paper ones.” Although half of the states claim to already do audits, Larry Norden says most are inadequate.
Read Pam Fessler’s full story on NPR, here.
Related:
MIT and UC Berkeley election experts call for presidential election audit: There's cause for concern
Russians hacked US voting systems and intelligence officials are still sitting on the information
Russians hacked into US voting systems in 39 states. Think what they can do between now and 2018
The Russian effort to hack US voting systems was broad, brazen and the results still unknown