Source: XKCD
Electronic voting systems have long been vulnerable to tampering and hacking. This has been known for more than 10 years, but little or nothing has been done about it.
Having a vulnerable system is like leaving your door unlocked or the keys in the ignition of your car. Eventually somebody is going to take advantage of you.
If we Americans want to protect our voting systems from tampering, it doesn’t matter if the suspected tamperers are Russians, Republicans or somebody else. We need written ballots that are hand-counted in public.
That’s only one of many problems. Our election system is increasingly rigged to favor Republicans by discouraging or disqualifying voting by poor people, young people and people of color.
LINKS
How They Could Steal the Election This Time by Ronnie Dugger for The Nation (2004)
It’s Magic! by Greg Palast (2012)
How They’re Stealing Ohio: Vote machines audit function turned off—and worse by Greg Palast (2016)
Justice Department Warns It Might Not Be Able to Prosecute Voting Machine Hackers by Kim Zetter for Motherboard [Added 9/31/2018]
How to Fight Voter Suppression in 2018 by Edward Burmila for Dissent Magazine. Twelve ways in which voting procedures are rigged against poor people, young people and people of color, and what to do about them.
Tags: Ballots, Election Tampering, Electronic Voting, Voter Suppression, voting, Voting machines
Phil Ebersole's Blog 
August 22, 2018 at 11:23 am |
I think it is fair to note that all electronic voting systems aren’t necessarily vulnerable to hacking, nor were older systems invulnerable.
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August 23, 2018 at 6:51 pm |
Our electronic voting systems are vulnerable to tampering. The one way to be completely safe is voting on paper ballots hand-counted in public.
The next best way is what we’ve got in New York state, which is machine-counted paper ballots. The problem with electronic scanning of paper ballots is that you might not know when the scanners have been monkeyed with and you need to count the actual ballots.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-08/hack-resistant-vote-machines-missing-as-states-gird-for-18-vote
https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824432/if-voting-machines-were-hacked-would-anyone-know
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3267625/security/want-to-hack-a-voting-machine-hack-the-voting-machine-vendor-first.html
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22591302/voting-machine-crack-las-vegas/
https://www.newsweek.com/election-hacking-voting-machines-software-1028948
If you’re concerned about Russians hacking our electronic voting systems, then you should want to take action to prevent it.
I don’t quarrel with that concern. I think there are other potential hackers besides Russians. I think there are other threats to our democratic process besides hacking voting machines. But, yes, let’s make our voting machines safe.
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