Voting-machine makers are already worried about Defcon

[bathroommonkey76]

Last year, Defcon's Voting Village made headlines for uncovering massive security issues in America's electronic voting machines. Unsurprisingly, voting-machine makers are working to prevent a repeat performance at this year's show.

According to Voting Village organizers, they're having a tough time getting their hands on machines for white-hat hackers to test at the next Defcon event in Las Vegas (held in August). That's because voting-machine makers are scrambling to get the machines off eBay and keep them out of the hands of the "good guy" hackers.

Village co-organizer Harri Hursti told attendees at the Shmoocon hacking conference this month they were having a hard time preparing for this year's show, in part because voting machine manufacturers sent threatening letters to eBay resellers. The intimidating missives told auctioneers that selling the machines is illegal -- which is false.

Electronic voting-machine manufacturers -- and anyone with a stake in keeping their flaws secret -- have oodles of reasons to prevent Defcon's Voting Village from having a repeat performance of last year's (perfectly legal) mass hacking of e-vote boxes.

Voting-machine hacking at Defcon isn't new; the conference has been joyfully cracking voting machines since 2004. The problems with voting-machine security, and the industry's unwillingness to acknowledge the problems discovered at Defcon, have ensured the voting machine hacking challenge has been coming back year after year.

In fact, the machines are so badly maintained, notoriously backdoored and easily hacked that even Defcon hackers massively stress out in forums and chat spaces about their own local and federal voting process.

As you'd expect, e-vote machine hacking was more popular than ever last year at Defcon.


Read more:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/26/voting-machine-makers-are-already-worried-about-defcon/

[RandomAccess]

1. Watch how insanely easy it is to hack U.S. voting machines

Link to tweet

I'm far less concerned about individual machines -- UNLESS the mfgr does a "patch" or "upgrade" or anything else on each machine just before the election -- than I am tabulating and collection hubs.

[bluestarone]

2. PAPER BALLOTS

PAPER BALLOTS

[RandomAccess]

3. Yes, PLEASE

I'm sure, personally, that paper ballots were a factor in Virginia's overwhelming wins recently. Yes, they had huge turnout, but they also had paper ballots.

[YessirAtsaFact]

4. There is is a paper trail, but the voting is done electronically

We fill out a bubble sheet and the machine scans it.

I like that approach, because you get the advantage of machine tallying the votes plus the ability to count by hand if the votes cast are completely out of line from polling.

And yes,we did have a huge turnout. Trump seems to have given everybody who isn't a deplorable the urge to vote as often as possible.

[OregonBlue]

5. There are still several states that use DRE without a paper ballot so the people counting can claim

anything they want.