The Myth of the Hacker Proof Voting Machine

SOURCE/LINK: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-hacker-proof-voting-machine.html

The New York Times
Magazine
The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine
By KIM ZETTERFEB. 21, 2018
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An optical-scan machine in Oklahoma City during the 2016 presidential primary. Credit Brett Deering/Getty Images

In 2011, the election board in Pennsylvania’s Venango County — a largely rural county in the northwest part of the state — asked David A. Eckhardt, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to examine its voting systems. In municipal and state primaries that year, a few voters had reported problems with machines ‘‘flipping’’ votes; that is, when these voters touched the screen to choose a candidate, the screen showed a different candidate selected. Errors like this are especially troubling in counties like Venango, which uses touch-screen voting machines that have no backup paper trail; once a voter casts a digital ballot, if the machine misrecords the vote because of error or maliciousness, there’s little chance the mistake will be detected.

Eckhardt and his colleagues concluded that the problem with the machines, made by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), was likely a simple calibration error. But the experts were alarmed by something else they discovered. Examining the election-management computer at the county’s office — the machine used to tally official election results and, in many counties, to program voting machines — they found that remote-access software had been installed on it.

Remote-access software is a type of program that system administrators use to access and control computers remotely over the internet or over an organization’s internal network. Election systems are supposed to be air-gapped — disconnected from the internet and from other machines that might be connected to the internet. The presence of the software suggested this wasn’t the case with the Venango machine, which made the system vulnerable to hackers. Anyone who gained remote access to the system could use the software to take control of the machine. Logs showed the software was installed two years earlier and used multiple times, most notably for 80 minutes on November 1, 2010, the night before a federal election.

The software, it turns out, was being used not by a hacker but by an authorized county contractor working from home. Still, the arrangement meant anyone who might gain control of the contractor’s home computer could use it to access and gain control of the county’s election system.

It was just another example of something that Eckhardt and other experts had suspected for many years: that many critical election systems in the United States are poorly secured and protected against malicious attacks.

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