Sometime last fall I wrote a post about the risk of the election being hacked. This was based on my experience on a federal commission appointed to study what went wrong in the 2000 election and to make recommendations about how to avoid another fiasco. The commission was chaired by former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. One of the issues we investigated was the reliability of voting machines. Everyone wanted to get rid of the “hanging chads” that marred the voting in Florida.
The obvious answer was to switch to electronic machines. No hanging chads. No uncertainty. We commissioned a study of voting machines. The most foolproof machine was the mechanical one that was used in New York City and other places. The voter goes into a booth with a curtain. When he pulls a giant lever, the curtain closes. He or she pulls little levers to cast a ballot. When the voter pulls the big lever to open the curtain, his vote is recorded. Nothing ambiguous. However, this machine was becoming obsolete, the manufacturer was not making them anymore as demand for electronic machines grew.
The experts told us that the electronic machines were susceptible to hacking but no one took that seriously. Who would hack an election?
Now we learn that hacking machines is easy. The more they are networked, the easier it is.
“LAS VEGAS – One of the nation’s largest cybersecurity conferences is inviting attendees to get hands-on experience hacking a slew of voting machines, demonstrating to researchers how easy the process can be.
“It took me only a few minutes to see how to hack it,” said security consultant Thomas Richards, glancing at a Premier Election Solutions machine currently in use in Georgia.
“The DEF CON cybersecurity conference is held annually in Las Vegas. This year, for the first time, the conference is hosting a “Voting Machine Village,” where attendees can try to hack a number of systems and help catch vulnerabilities.
“The conference acquired 30 machines for hackers to toy with. Every voting machine in the village was hacked.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Election Came Down to 77,744 Votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan
“Donald Trump owes his victory in the Electoral College to three states he won by the smallest number of votes: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So it’s fair to say that the 2016 presidential election was decided by about 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast. According to the final tallies, Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points (44,292 votes), Wisconsin by 0.7 points (22,748 votes), Michigan by 0.2 points (10,704 votes).”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-election-came-down-to-77744-votes-in-pennsylvania-wisconsin-and-michigan-updated/article/2005323
Imagine hacking some of the machines in those states in some counties and not all of them just enough to nudge out Hillary Clinton, and then you somehow get rid of the evidence.
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Simple solution: paper ballots counted by hand.
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Or a solution in which voters get a paper receipt with their electronic vote that they immediately put in a lock box that can be opened and counted if there are any questions about the election or a close vote.
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I am a telecommunications engineer, and computer systems specialist. I once volunteered to be an election judge, and supervise the voting at a precinct in Fairfax, VA. I set up the voting machines, and calculated the result.
I was not impressed with the quality of the voting machines. The systems were flimsy and poorly constructed. The software was primitive, and the results were sent in to the county headquarters by acoustic modem. The system could have been hacked by a 7th grader.
Fairfax has switched to a new system, where you “blacken the dots” on a paper card, and then push it through a scanner. The cards are kept in a secure container, and if there is a need for a recount, the cards are accessible and permanent.
Each state has their own voting systems, and the quality and security of the systems vary wildly. There is no national standard. I am 100% certain that virtually every system used today, could be hacked, by a determined hacking team.
The technology exists today, for on-line voting. The system could provide for individuals to vote on-line, with a very high degree of security and privacy.
I am not convinced that there was any serious fraud or manipulation of the election of 2016. Nevertheless, the potential for this kind of activity is very high. A congressional investigation is not only desirable, but it should be mandatory, if only to serve notice, that the potential for future hacking can be avoided.
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“The system could provide for individuals to vote on-line, with a very high degree of security and privacy.”
Really? Then how is that that credit card companies, which have been in the online business for well over a decade, still can’t manage to keep out hackers and keep their customers’ information secure? How is it that Anonymous has managed to hack into so many online systems? How is it that major corporations, with major bucks to spend on security, still can’t keep their online systems secure? “Online security” is an oxymoron. Or maybe just a sick joke.
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@Dienne77: Are you a systems engineer, or software analyst? The technology exists today, for on-line voting, with a very high level of security and privacy. I work with unclassified and classified systems for the US Department of Defense.
Individuals will be able to register to vote on-line (some states are already experimenting with on-line registration).
On-line voting systems and software can be designed, that are virtually hack-free, and also enable complete voting privacy, the system will be able to calculate the results, without disclosing the individual voter’s choices.
A system like this will be expensive, and of course all users will have to be online to utilize the system.
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CA has paper ballots. Last Fall newspapers reported homes received 78 ballots to one address of folks not living there. An honest person, in this case, returned the ballots.
The entire election system needs an overhaul.
The LAUSD and UTLA tells parents how to vote and they do.
Now LAUSD has a pro-charter school board.
I don’t have the answer but know that in CA most people send in their paper ballots, aka absentee ballots.
When they reach the L.A. County offices are they really counted?
Who’s checking?
Takes hours to find out a simple small city election, yet alone state results.
If there is hacking in elections can you imagine the joy of those who profit from school vendors who are joyful about the ease of hacking into school systems data?
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While I like early voting, I too find the use of ballots mailed to homes highly problematic. I can’t imagine that the need to vote anonymously cannot be easily preserved while massively increasing ballot security.
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I have voted by mail many times. I was posted overseas when I was in the Air Force, and when I worked for the US Government (in Africa).
In most states, it is very simple to get a postal ballot, and in some states anyone can request one without a reason (military service, hospital, etc)
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Why is it such a burden to go to a polling station?
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Low-income people often cannot manage to make the time to get to the polling place. Long hours, daycare, traffic, etc. People who can barely execute the day’s essential functions will often skip something as superfluous as voting.
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@Ponderosa. You have a valid point. Lower-income people, often face difficulties in getting off work, getting transportation to/from the polling place, child care, etc. Some states require photo ID, and lower-income people are less likely to have such ID accessible.
Many states have instituted early voting, and are attempting to make it easier for citizens to exercise their franchise.
Factoid: The reason that voting is on the first Tuesday in November, is so that farmers could get their crops harvested. And the reason that we vote on Tuesday, is that it would be a “sin” to vote on the sabbath.
Australia (and some other countries) have mandatory voting, you can be fined for refusing to vote.
Politicians in the USA will never bring in mandatory voting. With only 50% of eligible voters participating, a politician can win an election by satisfying only 25% of the citizens (plus one).
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Joan, provide links to your allegations of California paper ballot system.
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The administration and supervision of elections is a government operation. As such, it is as open to inefficiency and incompetence as any other government operation. My wife and I moved to Virginia in 2001. We went into the motor vehicle office, to obtain VA driver’s licenses, and license plates for our vehicles. The clerk asked us if we wished to register to vote. I asked for a registration card, and told the clerk that my wife could not register, since she was not a citizen. I filled out the card, and Larisa did not complete one.
A week later, voter identification cards arrived for both of us. I called the county office, and told them to delete Larisa from the voting rolls. I sent her card back, by registered mail.
BTW- 17 (seventeen) of the hijackers on Sept 11, 2001, had Virginia identification papers.
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Right, because private industry is never “open to inefficiency and incompetence”, as anyone who has ever attempted to contact their bank, mortgage holder, or cell phone or cable provider can attest. Ahem. If anything, a trip to the Secretary of State’s office to get a drivers’ license is a walk in the park comparatively speaking.
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How did Larissa’s name appear on a registration form she did not receive. I call BS
The following link is a Virginia voter registration form . I only have a BA not a BS, (hope you got that) but I do not see where it asks for your spouses name . Or even your marital status.
Sounds like a real (four letter word starting with f ) big Trump .
Click to access VoterRegistrationApplication.pdf
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The incident that I just described, occurred in December 2001, when we moved from Philadelphia to Norfolk VA. I filled out a voter registration form, using my name (only), and the form did not ask for marital status.
I do not know how Larisa got registered with the state of VA, when she did not fill out a form.
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Magic Just Magic. I am hoping to win the Lotto with out buying a ticket.
As you say you filled out the form which went to the board of elections not the DMV. At the time 2001 it was probably(?) a separate form from the License form , given to you upon request. Yet magically the BOE put your wife’s first name, last name, address and date of birth together and registered her as a Virginia voter.
1) Republican Governor Jim Gilmore was trying to pack the rolls with “illegal voting aliens” .
2) your memory is starting to falter.
3) It is like the rest of the voter disenfranchisement movement a bunch of Trumpian level B.S.
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Considering that 2/3 of the state’s have Republican governors and Reoublican Secretaries of State in charge of voter rolls, I wonder where all those illegal voters are. Maybe Trump thinks he should have won New York and California. He is delusional.
Seriously: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-says-mueller-just-called-him-and-said-hes-the-most-innocent-person-ever?mbid=nl_080317%20Borowitz%20Newsletter2%20(1)&CNDID=24457067&spMailingID=11622149&spUserID=MTMzMTgyNDgxNjMzS0&spJobID=1220303310&spReportId=MTIyMDMwMzMxMAS2
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What possible reason would I have to make up such a story? This incident really happened. I do not know how a registration card, with my wife’s information got to the board of elections, and how she was registered.
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Anyone trying to pack the voting rolls with Democrats surely made a mistake if they registered your wife.
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“In 2012, Florida Governor Rick Scott’s administration started an effort trying to crack down on noncitizens voting by comparing driver’s license data against voter rolls.
Through this process the Florida Department of State created a list of 182,000 potential noncitizens that had voted. That number was whittled down to 2,700, then to about 200 before the purge was stopped amid criticism that the data was flawed given the number of false positives — including a Brooklyn-born World War II vet.
Ultimately, only 85 people were removed from the voting rolls.”
If that’s the best a right wing rat like Rick Scott can come up with, after trying to take away voting rights from 182,000 they find only 85 who had registered improperly. The article does not say that any of these 85 had been prosecuted for voting illegally . You can rest assured that
had any voted illegally the Governor would have prosecuted them to the fullest extent of the law to justify the Millions he wasted on this effort. But the effort has an affect . When you get a letter from BOE saying you are ineligible far to many will just not bother to vote rather than show up at their BOE office to contest it, with or without a lawyer or with an AR15 over their shoulder.
But the effort to disenfranchise voters must have been very successful because Scott did it again in 2014.
One out of every 17 voters lives in the state of Florida. A state with a high Hispanic population . And 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000………… cases prosecuted for voter fraud.
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dianeravitch
The show is much more entertaining than the satire. But Prilosec has been found to cause dementia and Americans are doubling their dosage and consumption .
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Larisa is a first-generation immigrant from Russia. She earned her US citizenship in 2005. She despises Putin, and has no use for anyone, like him. Her political beliefs are private, but they tend to be on the liberal side. The clerk who mistakenly registered her to vote in Virginia, had no way of knowing her political feelings.
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Charles,
You or she must have provided the information to the clerk.
If she is illegally registered, lock her up!
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Q You or she must have provided the information to the clerk.
If she is illegally registered, lock her up! END Q
Not so. I filled out a registration card, Larisa did not. I specifically told the clerk, that Larisa was NOT a US Citizen, and not entitled to register.
How the clerk got the info, is a mystery. Maybe he copied the address ,etc. from my form. Her birth date and place of birth could have been obtained from her driver’s license application. But this is all supposition. I honestly don’t know.
When the voter ID card arrived in the mail, I immediately telephoned the board of elections, and told them to strike her name off the rolls. I mailed the ID card, back to the office, by registered mail, just to be safe.
You could say, that she was “illegally” registered, technically. I see no need for incarceration. She obtained her US Citizenship in 2005, and then she legally registered.
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Charles:
You have just made the argument that white Republicans make for why every single white person — including you — who registered to vote at that DMV over the last 10 years should have been struck off the ballot.
You have just made the argument that the voter fraud is really fraud by the people who work at drivers’ license bureaus who sign up white people who aren’t eligible and don’t actually vote.
Do you think that if Virginia had struck you off the rolls but you didn’t know it because no one told you and when you showed up you couldn’t vote. Would you be cheering on your own disenfranchisement because that drivers’ license official made a mistake about your wife which had nothing to do with whether you were eligible?
Or if the “voter fraud” committee was made up of Democrats looking for excuses for disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of white voters likely to vote Republican because they were registered at the DMV that fraudulently registered your wife, would you wonder if they were more interested in political gain than fraud?
We do not strike off hundreds of thousands of white voters like you because some DMV registered a white woman who was more likely to be Republican. But we could. All it takes is people like you looking the other way and claiming that actions that have nothing to do with finding fraud are legitimate. I doubt you’d be happy when you learned that thirty thousand white people who got a license and registered at the DMV were disenfranchised because the fact your wife was registered proved fraud. You would know it was an attempt to make it hard for those white people to vote using a reason that was nonsensical.
You just provided an anecdote that demonstrates all that is wrong with the voter fraud commission. They aren’t interested in fraud. they are interested in disenfranchising voters who belong to groups that make them more likely to vote Democrat.
Imagine the Democrats doing that kind of nasty nonsense to disenfranchise you. Because you just provided exactly the reason they need to kick everyone off the rolls.
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@NYC: What makes you think I am a Caucasian? And what made you conclude that I am registered as a Republican? And what makes you think that my most recent registration was at a Virginia DMV office? You are jumping to some odd conclusions.
I am not asserting that Larisa’s registration in 2001, was fraudulent. I am stating that someone screwed up, and registered her by mistake. I do not believe that there was an intent to defraud by anyone.
My last registration occurred at a library in my community, when I returned from an overseas deployment. (Virginia permits registration at many different government offices). When I went to vote in 2016, at my local precinct, the clerk could not find my name on the voter rolls. I drove back to my old precinct, and there was my name! I voted there, and then re-registered in my local precinct.
Of course, I would like to see the system running properly. All eligible voters should be able to vote, no dispute. Ineligible persons should be stricken from the rolls. All aliens, whether illegal or illegal MUST be denied any access to voting, because voting is for citizens ONLY.
BTW- Virginia has “open” primaries, and all voters may vote across party lines, so it does not matter if you declare party affiliation when you register.
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“I am not asserting that Larisa’s registration in 2001, was fraudulent. I am stating that someone screwed up, and registered her by mistake. I do not believe that there was an intent to defraud by anyone.”
You just stated in a nutshell why the “voter fraud” commission is such a fraud. I agree with you that someone registered your wife by mistake. And I agree that when Trump’s daughter and a relative high number of other high ranking Trump campaign associates were found to be registered in two states it was a mistake. Not an attempt at fraud.
That’s why you would agree it would be absurd to strike off every single person who ever registered at that DMV. You would know that the people trying to strike off hundreds of thousands of voters using your wife’s “fraudulent” registration as their excuse are not doing it to prevent fraud. They are doing it to prevent people who (because of their race or background) are more likely to vote Democrat from voting. And I would say the same if it was Republicans but Dems have never stooped so low to disenfranchise Republicans.
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The constant drumbeat from the right about virtually nonexistent in-person voting fraud is a distraction from the true reality: whoever counts the votes controls the election, and if you can electronically stuff the ballot box as was demonstrated at DefCon, and put an end to exit polling as was done in many places this time past, the count will go as the corrupt string pullers desire it to. The extra insurance of Gerrymandered districts doesn’t hurt the interests of the corrupt.
A paper ballot, anonymously identified and linked to the electronic one that can be double checked by the voter before the ballot is submitted would make things harder for cheaters, but I would not be surprised if they found a way to circumvent even that. I like the system where the ballot is first marked by hand and then scanned, recorded and saved. I am also in favor of mandatory exit polling, bipartisan teams of paid citizen volunteers being my first choice on how to get that done. Citizens man polling places as election judges in many places already, again on a bipartisan basis, and from what I’ve seen there’s no “keeping each other honest” to be seen because they all want to be honest in the first place. We The People must be the ones running the electoral system, not the politicians and other grifters.
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And yet; there he is in W Virginia, still publicly insisting that the entire report of Russian meddling is fake news.
Don’t believe the FBI, CIA, NSA, and every other national security branch in our allied nations. Believe me.
This is so bad.
Regarding the voting machines: what is the likelihood that we return to the days of the manually operated booths? None whatsoever if Trump stays in office. But would other politicians see this as the problem that it represents and try to enact a change?
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Each state has their own voting systems and requirements. There is no uniform national standard, which has advantages and disadvantages. The feds could adopt guidelines and standards, for the states to follow.
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see this
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2017-07-31/hackers-demonstrate-how-vulnerable-voting-machines-are
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To understand how easy just ask Michael Connell, former Rethuglican election consultant during the 2004 campaign. What? You can’t? He’s dead?
Michael Louis Connell was a high-level Republican consultant who was subpoenaed in a case regarding alleged tampering with the 2004 U.S. Presidential election and a case involving thousands of missing emails pertaining to the political firing of U.S. Attorneys. Connell was killed when the plane he was flying crashed on December 19, 2008. (from Wiki)
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UNless I am mistaken, the next convening of the hackers will look at the matter of hacking a system of voting machines, not individual machines. I do not know how that experiment will be set up, but there are incredibly detailed maps of actual and likely voters and the simulation might use these.
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Read this and weep. Illegal aliens will be able to vote, in this Maryland town:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/08/07/maryland-city-mulling-over-idea-to-let-undocumented-residents-vote.html
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Charles,
From the Koch brothers’ extreme right, libertarian and biased CATO Institute and now Fox (fake and super biased) news.
Did you fact check this FOX news piece from reputable and reliable sources? I don’t think so. Prove me wrong. I will not accept any site that has a proven financial link to the extreme right or left.
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