Don’t tell me you actually expected your vote to count!
Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.
“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”
[…]
Indeed, the Argonne team’s attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine’s proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive “alien electronics” into the machine.
[…]
“The cost of the attack that you’re going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities,” explains Warner in the video. “If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that’s another $15. So the total cost would be $26.”
From a modern technology point of view, there just ain’t much to a voting machine. It should be ridiculously easy to make it invulnerable. So, the only reason it isn’t has to be it is supposed to be insecure and easily hackable.
This goes under the assumption that votes are actually counted
You know what hacker will offer next?
Election results…
I can see the sites already.
LolSec/Anonymous election manipulation:
• real-time monitoring and manipulation,
• win by a reasonable margin,
• insure that your opponent loses but not so badly or so narrowly that there a call for a recount. (Avoid a Bush vs Gore fuck up.)
Just send us your cash.
People need to be made aware of this though I already was. I consider electronic voting machines to be nothing more than automated vote stealing. I know things aren’t as they should be because I did a vote for a guy and it didn’t show up in the count. I may have been the only person to vote for them in my district but the vote should have been listed in the totals.
Well, we can thank the lazy voters of Florida in the 2000 presidential elections for these machines. I remember the Gore campaigns so-called “expert’s” cock-n-bull story claiming that if these punch machines were not emptied, that the chads could pile up under a particular candidate and cause an under-vote.
Florida was a disaster waiting to happen, too many apathetic voters, not taking their time, not following the posted instructions, and lets not forget the infamous “butterfly” ballot.
Oh, almost forgot the overzealous Media and their poor attempt to be the first to call the Election.
How to hack a voting machine for only $5
Go to your local Home Depot parking lot and slip a fin to an illegal, then drive him to the local polling location and tell him who to vote for.
To increase your voting power, pick up more illegals at the same time.
“From a modern technology point of view, there just ain’t much to a voting machine. It should be ridiculously easy to make it invulnerable.” – there is huge misconception in general public that it is just carelessness that makes software/electronics vulnerable. Problem is much deeper. Most of these systems are made to be unbreakable as far as their creators knew. Example: There was relatively recent development with some older models that were designed with every thought and without error. Hardware and (seemingly unchangeable software). Well, little bit of Physics, little bit of exponentially developing tech and little bit of never before done hacking magic… voila – 10 seconds alone (or with slight of hand) with the machine and less than 50$ of commonly available supplies from electronic store gets you ownership of results from that voting machine. Despite it being extremely thoughtfully designed at the (recent) time.
So it is not “ridiculously easy” but next to impossible to do this right. We must assume electronic systems will always be vulnerable and of short safe lifetime. Add the expense and it becomes clear that simple paper ballots have intrinsic advantages of old tech – very hard to mass-manipulate without massive cost in time, effort, money. Electronic voting and particularly Internet based one must be banned because of their intrinsic vulnerability to mass manipulation by wrong-doers that can’t be corrected.
dusanmal, you will never get liberals to disown internet voting. technology is the future.
Expect to hear about this on the next “Security Now” podcast by Steve Gibson.
I’d be curious to learn how effective this hack is when the voting machine is actually attached to the rest of the up and running network of computers before the man-in-the-middle attack is applied.
If the back end polls the machine often enough, the brief physical disconnect of the network connection required for the hack to work would be easily detected as a network/hardware failure and reported as such. A casual physical inspection for loose connectors by a poll worker would likely spot the device if it’s still connected.
The hack as described does seem to require at least some info about which bits mean which votes would need to be determined if you’re not changing them randomly. That would take a bit of time to determine without prior access to the machines, let alone set up the device to alter votes as desired on the fly.
Where I live, they use the electronic results for initial tallies but inspect the paper roll printouts of the voting to count the official results, if memory serves me right. They use a voting machine be “Hart” that uses a selection wheel rather than a touch screen. It makes the screens much easier to read because your not fighting finger prints. Point of fact, to save money, they are or were thinking of moving completely to vote by mail ballots since more and more people are doing that anyways.
They want to make them cheap. It is technically easy and feasible to secure a voting box through hardware.
A cheap cable box has tamper resistant design elements that can be used. Secured ROM, buried copper traces, CableCard…
The notion that one programmer can insert back door code is ridiculous much less the option of someone physically tampering with the box (or boxes).
Even Karl Rove is stumped on this.
Looks like the final stage of taking the voter out of the loop.
Dallas, the machine itself doesn’t have to be hacked. The guy counting the votes can change the tallies with a few keystrokes. A memory card is infinitely easier to modify than a thousand paper ballots.
Funny that the lottery ticket machine at your corner drugstore is more secure than the ones we use for elections. Guess winning the lottery is more important.
The problem is we can either have
a) easily rigged elections
OR
b) do away with the secret ballot.
Right now we’ve got heart attack (easily rigged elections,) but we’ve got lots of proof of electoral cancer (no secret ballots.)
If we do away with the secret ballot we have all sorts of problems with vindictive sore winners who abuse their newfound position to punish anybody with the temerity to have voted against them. (We know who you are, and now you’re gonna pay.)
There’s a lot of those pocket-Stalin creeps and it gets worse the more local and piddling the election.
Wanna see what it looks like on a national level? Look at almost every “election” campaign won by Saddam Hussein.
@jbenson. If you did that in NY, you, and your “illegal” would spend some time in the Crowbar Hotel. Perhaps that’s done in your state, but not in mine.
#10 The box itself can be locked down.
To your other point, I’m not convinced either that some person can willy nilly change votes with a key stroke.
It would have to be a mass conspiracy ala GOP Watergate scale. Even that fell apart.
I say, go the path of electronic voting and issue a paper receipt. God knows we get a paper receipt to buy a pack of gum.
The Commie Stalin said: “It doesn’t matter how the People vote, it matters WHO COUNTS THE VOTES!!!” The Fascist Repukes agree with him and are MONKEY WRENCHING THE ELECTIONS EVERYWHERE THEY CAN !!! They KNOW THEY ARE A ***MINORITY PARTY***, REPRESENTING THE RICH 1% AS THEY DO !!! Any working person who votes for a Repuke or Tea Bagger is just HANDING THEM A KNIFE TO PLUNGE INTO YOUR BACK !!! Just see any of the stories about the Ryan “Plan” to ***DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE*** !!!
Computerized Voting is a VIDEO GAME YOU CAN’T WIN !!!
Love to see the statistics of actual fraud not just calls of the sky falling
#1. LOL!
#17 and how do you collect stats on undetectable voting fraud?
any good conspiracy theory needs that key “un”-detectable quality
no Cave is not a counter-misinformation establishment type just a realest who is not convinced the sky is falling
I will say only 1 thing here about electronic voting.
ANY general GEEK with abit of programming experience and understanding of Hardware could MAKE a good voting machine,,,and 99% unhackable.
The difficulty comes with WHO WANTS WHAT in these machines.
I think I’m going to throw this election.
Let’s see, I’m going to change only 50,000 machines to vote my way.
That would be … 50,000 X $15 = $750,000 for the electronics. Ok.
Not to mention having to make them myself to save on labor. Say 1 hour each for 50,000 hours labor.
Now, I will need secret access to 50,000 machines. Hummm…
Now I will need, say, 1/2 hour per machine to get it open, modify the machine, and close it up again. Another 25,000 hours.
So, for the 2012 election I will simply need $750,000, complete secrecy and 75,000 hours not including sleeping, eating, and travel time.
Yes, this sounds feasible.
The paper ballot was best. The rest keeps making things worse. Of course Dallas has a point that if you had to get a print out that you approved and dropped int a box there would be a paper trail. It would also cost more money and fail to print at least some of the time.
Yes, we have electronic machines over here which also produces a paper ballot receipt. It’s very simple and you can check your vote before you leave.
This entire article is FUD.
>> ECA said, on September 28th, 2011 at 2:33 pm
>> ANY general GEEK with abit of programming experience and understanding of Hardware could MAKE a good voting machine,,,and 99% unhackable.
Seems like a perfect project for the open source community. They are used to making stuff BOTH transparent and secure.
#25
Greg,
but WHO will acknowledge that its been done, CHEAPER, and Properly..
There is an OLD trick..and it works.
Getting ‘Persons’ unknown, to have multiple residences, in multiple states and locations.
Even as a “shadow agency” all you need is the residences, and Paper work for those places. Then make FAKE Picture ID for those persons.
Its been done for years.
There is something STUPID that the states have done, and its taking YEARS, DECADES to fix. Birth and death records, arnt KEPT UP, and many times they are Different departments(and the twain never meet)..
Greg,
it could be done with as much as a 486 8 megs, with Linux, and HTML.. you need voice so SOME may hear that they are voting on, and MULTI lingual..
Then SCAPE the board of all connections NOT NEEDED, and place the program LIVE in ram ONLY. And SAVE to an internal INCRIPTED 1-10 gig drive.
Check out this handy comparison of a Las Vegas Slot Machine vs. an Electronic Voting Machine.
http://tinyurl.com/2dktdhb
ECA,
I’m not sure the voting machines needs to verify the voters. That’s for the election officials to do.
Whatever the solution — a human readable paper ballot has to be the final voting authority for close elections. I don’t think the public would trust anything less tangible.
So, the voting machine would be, ultimately, just a fancy way to print a ballot.
The machines would tabulate the votes, of course, and in blow-out races that would be good enough. But in the close elections, the ballots can be hand counted by humans.
One more advantage to the printed ballot. It would end these claims that “the machine changed all my votes at the last second.”
If a voter can double-check the printed ballot before putting it in the ballot box. If there is a goof on it, they can tear it up and vote again.
I suspect the claims about machines changing votes at the last second are bogus. If there was fraud, I doubt they would do it right on the screen! Instead, I think people goof up their vote and blame the machine.