With the hilarious, sad, and downright generally lacking
presidential election that is occurring, it is hard to not pay attention as
this election process plays out. November 8th is coming and this is
probably one of the most important elections for eligible voters to actually
get out to vote in.
Researchers at Princeton University, in addition to some
Computer Science graduate students, worked to see how they could hack a voting
machine to change the outcome of a casted vote to test the security of the
voting system. A professor, by the name
of Andrew Appel, and many other professors and graduate students showed how
they could hack the AVC (Advantage Voting Machines) used in many states. They
found that when they studied the source code of the AVC Advantage that it does
not follow best software engineering practices and that the Independent Test
Authority report does not accurately and sufficiently assess the security of
the AVC Advantage. There were at least two program bugs that slipped through
the ITA review according the professors.
There were also some ‘user interface design flaws’ of the
AVC Advantage which has the potential to cause inaccuracy in recording votes. Ballots
are prepared and results are tallied with a Windows application called “WinEDS”
that runs on computers. ‘The votes cast on an individual machine are recorded
in the same cartridge, which poll workers bring to election headquarters after
polls close. The voting machines are left at the polling places for a few days
until the trucking company picks them up at election headquarters in each
county’. This allows ample time for a dedicated and fully intentioned hacker to
do their work. In addition, the source code of the WinEds application appears
to be written by another company and sold to AVC Advantage. This could lead to
loss of accuracy and reliability because the company that creates and issues
the voting machines didn’t even write the code it uses which could lead to some
holes in security.
When it comes to something such as voting for a president for
one of the most influential countries in the world, there should be greater
research into how to make the voting system safer so that it can truly reflect a
Democracy.
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