Ninety Minutes
According to The Hill —
Hackers at at a conference in Las Vegas were able to successfully breach the software of U.S. voting machines in just 90 minutes on Friday, illuminating glaring security deficiencies in America’s election infrastructure.
People who sell electronic voting machines tell us that it is impossible to hack an election in the United States because each state has their own voting system and each county within those states has difference voting machines and it would be almost impossible to break into all of them.
But, you don’t have to break into all of them. You would only need to hack fewer than 100 or so key precinct in targeted counties in 3 or 4 states to swing the electoral college in a completely new direction.
In my county, a recount means just looking at the voting totals in each precinct and adding them again. That means there is no such thing as a recount. The exception is mail ballots, which can be handed counted.
I want to go back to pencils, paper, and locked metal boxes. They can be “hacked”, but it would take longer to make secret copies of the ballots and slip them into the box while both a Democrat and a Republican are present.
Ninety minutes.
Damn.
Thanks to Craig for the heads up.
90 minutes. No wonder Donnie is so sensitive about having been duly “elected.” 3 states and approximately 30,000 votes was all it took to disgrace the Electoral College and our nation.
Oh. Still looking for a valid answer to why the recounts were stopped in the affected states. Anyone heard anything?
1Yes, and as soon as voting machines built without an ability to audit for accuracy (by Republican mega-donors) were implemented, they started winning elections. Odd, that.
2IN Connecticut we fill out paper ballots that are then fed into a machine that counts the same technology as the SAT test. Electronic machines with paper ballots is the only way to go.
3RepubAnon: I imagine a lot of us have been thinking that. I know I’ve been saying it for awhile. A lot of recent elections seem to have been too close to call all the way down to the wire. Then just enough repugnantcans show up right where they’re needed most. The latest runoff election in Georgia is a great example. I think it was Politico that said the democrat was ahead all day, and then at the last minute repugnantcans turned out in droves. I also think it’s interesting that for the most part, exit polls were accurate to within a few percentage points until around the same time electronic voting machines came into play. What a coincidink.
4Used to take a mere 30 min, must be the new improved un hackable hardware. Thanks for new data but we’ve KNOWN this for over 10 years. And you wonder why lying immoral Republicans keep winning elections
5IIRC, all the voting machine makers are big donors to the Republican Party.
6I’m just waiting for the day when us voters are identified by eye scan before being allowed into the voting booth. Then we could use our eyes to vote by blinking: one blink, Democrat; two blinks, Republican; any other amount of blinks for any other party on the ballot. Same thing for local referendum stuff: one blink, yes; two blinks, no.
Since everyone’s eyes are different from someone else, there would be way less chance of a “ringer” voting in some other voter’s name.
Whaddaya think?
7The Hill folks bought used, probably obsolete, equipment off eBay. They had access to the physical box that would be difficult to have in the real world. Election machines are delivered knocked down over the evening before an election. An election tech, usually employed by the county election administrator, sets up the tabulating machines, including the proper programming for the present election and sets the counters to zero. This is proved by a paper tape printed during setup and printed again by the election judge at 7am election day.
That said I would look elsewhere for explanations of Republican wins, including gerrymandered geography to build districts. Princeton has software available to profile your geographic area and assess whether or not gerrymandering might have impacted election results.
All that said I remain interested in how a hacker would attack an election system on election day and succeed, as well as how an auditor could catch same. Hackers are never that slick. I have met financial crime auditors who are slick enough to lay hands on an election and osmose the misplaced numbers.
8maggie, you’re onto something, but you are too good of a person. With what happened with the Russian interference and whatever other crap Donnie’s kids did, I have to go with what old Joe Stalin said: “Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything.”
Yes, please, let’s do everything we can to insure all eligible voters have an opportunity to vote. We also owe it to voters to be sure every vote is counted and that the tabulations cannot be altered.
Kris Koback and his mission of morons are the frauds. Voter fraud falls somewhere in between miniscule and non-existent. To actually sway an election requires criminals, a few of whom may be Russian while it is without a doubt the majority are snacilbupeR.
9Micr, yes. Let’s call this voting parts I & II.
Part I – stop the gerrymandering, targeted wiping of voter rolls, and every little ALEC law designed to suppress the vote.
Part II – count the vote. Be it by mail or electronic or a penciled ballot into a lock box, both voters and those who would alter election results need to know that if there’s any ratf^cking with the tabulations, that will be immediately obvious. And, better yet easily corrected by a recount.
We were screwed by Dubya, Jeb and what’s her name with a stalled recount. This time Donnie snuck in by some unaccounted for reason recounts were stopped in the states that delivered an inexplicable EC victory to Dolt45.
10Thanks Micr, good info.
Can an election tech, usually employed by the county election administrator, set up the tabulating machines with improper non traceable programming that falsify the results?
Isn’t older voting machine hardware in some states easy to hack?
11Tom, Minnesota votes the same way Connecticut does. It’s trustworthy.
12They had access to the physical box that would be difficult to have in the real world. Election machines are delivered knocked down over the evening before an election. An election tech, usually employed by the county election administrator, sets up the tabulating machines, including the proper programming for the present election and sets the counters to zero. This is proved by a paper tape printed during setup and printed again by the election judge at 7am election day.
Um, I invite you to google the vote counting history of Republican-dominated Wisconsin swing Waukesha county, in which the county secretary of state keeps the voting machines in her own domicile for a week before the election, and until recently tabulated the votes on a PC kept in her home, and is also the county Republican committee chairman. The Walker recount turned on the votes in this county, and there’s a story there worth looking up.
I’ve been a practicing computer engineer for 35 years not, and I tell you that computers are a completely inappropriate mechanism for recording votes. California investigated every available system, and went to pen-marked paper ballots tabulated by scanner. There’s almost no “programming” of any kind involved, and the primary voting instrument (the paper ballot) is always recountable.
13Sumpm just occurred to me. We finally found the one environmental policy that repugnantcans support. Saving trees by ensuring no paper is wasted on something as trivial as elections.
14Joel Hanes: Please do me a favor and make clear that you meant to say 35 years now. Not 35 years not.
15I can speak only to election administration in north Texas counties where I have worked or consulted.
@lex
One unscrupulous programmer can steal more than than 100 bandits with firearms. That the VAST majority of programmers do not is the wonder of the industry. In a 40ish year IT career in local government and small public companies I found two. One used the round function to take portions of pennies (0.00005) in the tax tables to pay a bogus employee he added to the employee files.
The other wrote an assembler program and embedded it in the program that processed terminations. The assembler program executed when it detected a termination code in his employee record. This program in turn called a program that IBM SEs used to forcibly format the hard disk of a new install.
So yes a programmer could theoretically pre-load totals then print a zeroed out tape. The audit should catch this because the number of voters is compared against the number of votes cast. Newer equipment (Votronic) requires a mark in each race, making audit somewhat simpler.
@joel hanes
16In my presently depressed state of mind I intellectually agree with you. Automation frees humans of the drudgery of repetitive tasks. In the early 80s when I got tangentially associated with computer election systems I was a gewhiz guy along with all the other gewhiz guys. The theft of the 2000 election in Florida jaded me more than a bit. The 2016 election convinced me that maybe ink marked paper ballots were the only things left to restore any degree of trust in Texas elections.
In most states, the secretary of state approves voting machines that counties can use so each county does not different machines. Some smaller counties still use paper ballots. If you go to the SOS office can find the approved systems and the system used by each county.
17Even the folks who incorrectly chase “voter fraud” should admit that the issue of who votes is totally moot if the votes can just be manipulated later. Protecting the voting machines should be first, period.
MAGGIE: Retinal scanning could be done as a form of voter id (if sometime in the future that becomes an issue), but some might take issue with the gov’t maintaining biometric data for fear it’d eventually intrude beyond that. (Look at what’s happened with SSANs which were – initially – only supposed to be for employment.)
18Yes, “not” should be “now” in my comment.
19You can’t count the votes of people who don’t vote. 66 million chose to not do their civic duty. That there is the problem. I’m just sayin…
20JAKvirginia, I tend to agree, but if they can’t be bothered to get up off their butts and go vote (allowing for those who really can’t), how informed are they going to be as voters? And for whom did the last batch of uninformed voters vote?
21Tom, I bet our CT scanners are a lot cheaper than the computerized machines as well.
22Thanks again Micr!
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