Computer scientist shows how to tamper with Georgia voting machine, in election security trial: “All it takes is five seconds and a Bic pen.”::An expert witness for plaintiffs seeking to bar Georgia’s touchscreen voting machines showed a crowded courtroom how he could tamper with election res
What is the gdpr reason this website is not available to users in Europe?
I believe some websites say “fuck it, fuck them” and block European IPs rather than put in the work to become GDPR compliant
https://archive.ph/Qt9By is available.
Paywall
Huddled around a voting machine in a federal courtroom, a small crowd watched as expert witness Alex Halderman demonstrated how someone could meddle with a Georgia election within seconds.
Halderman, a University of Michigan computer scientist, changed results of a hypothetical referendum on Sunday alcohol sales. He flipped the winner in a theoretical election between President George Washington and Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary War general who defected to the British. He rigged the machine to print out as many ballots as he wanted.
All he needed was a pen to reach a button inside the touchscreen, a fake $10 voter card he had programmed, or a $100 USB device that he plugged into a cord connected to a printer, rewriting the touchscreen’s code.
Halderman delivered his presentation during an election security trial evaluating whether Georgia’s voting system is vulnerable to manipulation or programming errors. All in-person voters in Georgia make their choices on touchscreens that print out paper ballots.
Election officials countered Halderman’s testimony with assurances that real-world elections in Georgia have never been hacked and security precautions prevent the possibility of interference.
“All of these things worry me — just how easy these machines would be to tamper with. It’s so far from a secure system,” Halderman testified Thursday. “There are all kinds of politically motivated actors that would be eager to affect results.”
Under questioning from attorneys defending Georgia’s Dominion voting equipment, Halderman said there’s no evidence that the vulnerabilities he showed have ever been exploited in an actual election.
Through eight days of the trial, attorneys for the liberal-leaning Georgia voters and activists who are plaintiffs in the case have tried to convince U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg that she should order the state to prohibit further use of the voting touchscreens as the 2024 elections approach. Voters would instead fill out paper ballots by hand.
Testimony in the case included evidence about the January 2021 breach in Coffee County, when tech experts hired by supporters of Donald Trump copied Georgia’s election software, then distributed it to conspiracy theorists across the country. The plaintiffs have also sought to prove that the secretary of state’s office hasn’t done enough to protect election security and voters’ rights.
But State Election Board member Matt Mashburn told the judge that hacking would be difficult to pull off during an election.
Credit: [email protected]
“There are serious potentialities. Now, how practical they are to put in place is a different question,” Mashburn said Wednesday, according to a court transcript.
Flaws in voting machines would be difficult to exploit at more than one voting machine at a time, minimizing the potential danger, he said.
“I just didn’t think it was realistic,” Mashburn said. “Is it something you’ve got to change the whole system for? … I just don’t believe that is very likely. It is possible, but it is not very likely.”
Halderman testified that he discovered vulnerabilities after he was given access to a Fulton County touchscreen, called a ballot-marking device, as an expert witness in the case. He reported his findings to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, which validated the technology weaknesses in June 2022.
Election officials have said Georgia’s voting equipment is secured by locks and seals, poll workers overseeing precincts, preelection testing and audits of paper ballots.
Halderman said a wrongdoer, hidden behind a privacy screen at a voting precinct, wouldn’t necessarily be caught by election workers. Changing a touchscreen’s programming would take seconds or minutes but potentially create “chaos” in a major election, when it would be difficult to determine which ballots were legitimate, he said.
It isn’t necessary to open up a voting machine or remove security seals to gain “superuser” access to a touchscreen and change its programming, Halderman testified. Any voter could bring a forged voter card, pen or USB drive loaded with malicious code to a voting machine.
In one of Halderman’s hacks, the text on the ballot would reflect the candidate the voter picked, but the computer QR code counted by a ballot scanner would count the opposite choice. Georgia lawmakers are considering legislation that would remove QR codes from ballots.
The vulnerabilities Halderman showed in court would only affect one voting machine at a time, but he also testified that many more votes could be changed if someone gained access to election management servers overseen by state and county election officials.
Attorneys for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the defendant in the case, contend that the mere possibility of election tinkering doesn’t amount to a violation of voting rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, such as free speech and equal protection rights.
“Plaintiffs have failed to produce a single shred of evidence to substantiate the supposed ‘risks’ they fear,” a court filing by the defendants states. “There is no evidence that their ballots or any ballots cast using a BMD (ballot-marking device) were not accurately counted or that any vote has been changed. … Weighing risk is a political and not judicial decision.”
Witnesses for the defendants this week will attempt to dispute the plaintiffs’ allegations with testimony from Georgia election officials and cybersecurity experts.
The case will be decided by Totenberg, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, in the weeks after the trial concludes
Give me 5 seconds and a bic pen. I’ll get it open.
I have said it before and I’ll say it again, electronic voting does not work and is a bad idea.
The election system is dependant on trust, trust that the votes are not changed nor counted incorrectly.
This works with paper ballots, you keep the ballot box sealed and under observation by observers from different parties, they can then verify that the ballots have not been changed after voting, you count the ballots together, in front of everyone, they can then verify that counting was done correctly.
With electronic voting the votes are cast by interacting with buttons on a black box, no one is able to verify that the votes are recorded correctly nor that they are counted correctly during the actual election.
I like the system we have in New Mexico. (Yes it’s one of the 50 states)
You can go to any poling place, and they print you a local ballot for where you live, right there. You fill in the bubbles with your choices, then run it through a scanner machine on your way out.
You get instant counting and can track results live all day. If there’s a technical problem, or any uncertainty in the results, you can always go back to the paper and hand count.
It gives the benefits of all the options.
How.is it providing secrecy and result checking at the same time?
There’s no identifiable info on the ballot.
The ballots themselves are available to be recounted if necessary.
Electronic voting works wonders. All you need to sacrifice is anonymity.
Which is why it doesn’t work in real elections.
Voter anonymity is critical to a functioning democracy.
Uh, no. We already have dozens of publicly characterestics to discrinate people against, we can handle one more for a huge benefit of never ever doubting election count results again.
No, just no.
The moment voter secrecy is gone, you will have a far, far , far worse situation.
The moment you can verify what a person voted for, then you have opened the door for violence, intimidation and voter bribery.
The point of voter secrecy is to prevent others from being able to force you to vote on your own.
Immagine a wife of a MAGA husband, with voter secrecy she would have the option to hide voting for the Democrts, without it she would be able to be forced by her husband to vote for the republicans.
This is simply because he would be able to verify her vote, with voter secrecy he has to trust her. (Obviously there are ways he still could come close to verifying her vote, but there remains options for her)
I’m coming from an oppressive dictatorship that kills people for disagreeing with them. One thing to enables them to is voter anonymity. An oppressive MAGA husband example is cute, ofc, but I wasn’t solving “how do we make people vote with there heart is”, this is kinda out of scope and definitely not crucial for a functional democracy, but wishlist-grade at best.
Now, voter bribery is a good one. Never thought of that and can see how this could be a much more sizeable problem.
Ok but how would a lack of voter secrecy prevent the government from killing people who voted “wrong”?
To me that just seems like it would make it easier.
I am a Swede and have luckily never had to think about these things, if I am being arrogant with my staunch support of voter secrecy, I want to know.
You can’t kill 12+% when you’re in a demographics hole.
