After the last election the Democrats were throwing a fit over supposed Russian interference with the presidential election (funny how politicians here get bent out of shape when somebody interferes with their elections). Implied in the accusation is that an extremely sophisticated enemy such as a state actor is necessary to interfere with a United States election. However, the security of many election machines and election-related sites is so bad that an 11-year-old can break into them:
An 11-year-old boy on Friday was able to hack into a replica of the Florida state election website and change voting results found there in under 10 minutes during the world’s largest yearly hacking convention, DEFCON 26, organizers of the event said.
Thousands of adult hackers attend the convention annually, while this year a group of children attempted to hack 13 imitation websites linked to voting in presidential battleground states.
The boy, who was identified by DEFCON officials as Emmett Brewer, accessed a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website. He was one of about 50 children between the ages of 8 and 16 who were taking part in the so-called “DEFCON Voting Machine Hacking Village,” a portion of which allowed kids the chance to manipulate party names, candidate names and vote count totals.
Florida’s website isn’t an isolated incident. The entire infrastructure supporting elections here in the United States is a mess:
Even though most states have moved away from voting equipment that does not produce a paper trail, when experts talk about “voting systems,” that phrase encompasses the entire process of voting: how citizens register, how they find their polling places, how they check in, how they cast their ballots and, ultimately, how they find out who won.
Much of that process is digital.
“This is the problem we always have in computer security — basically nobody has ever built a secure computer. That’s the reality,” Schneier said. “I want to build a robust system that is secure despite the fact that computers have vulnerabilities, rather than pretend that they don’t because no one has found them yet. And people will find them — whether it’s nation-states or teenagers on a weekend.”
And before you think that you’re state is smart for not using voting machines, you should be aware that computers are involved in various steps of any modern voting process. Minnesota, for example, uses paper ballots but they’re fed into an electronic machine. Results from local ballot counts are transmitted electronically. Those results are then eventually transmitted electronically to media sources and from there to the masses.
If you go to cast your ballot today, know that there is no reason to believe that it will matter. There are far too many pieces of the voting infrastructure that are vulnerable to the machinations of 11-year-olds.