beatbandito wrote:So in about two minutes you can some-what noisily alter physical components of the machine and then... what? Add a thousand votes? Change votes?
If you've got admin access, yes, presumably you can add, remove, or change votes.
Steal the personal information of anyone who uses that machine in a way that is somehow easier than every other alternative?
The voting machines probably don't store voters' personal information; that's handled separately. The vote count should be separated from the list of who's voted.
And these are things there is absolutely no way to notice after the fact? There's no network they're on that will notice if something changed on the machine?
I think it's very unlikely that there's such redundancy in place. The machine may keep logs of when the admin console has been accessed, but (1) someone with admin access can probably delete them, (2) people likely won't even check the logs unless they have reason to suspect something is amiss, and (3) even assuming they realize the votes have been tampered with, what do they do then? I'm guessing it doesn't come with a "restore votes to before the admin logged in" button.
There's no person in the polling place to notice the louder and longer than usual voter also left the machine physically altered?
Polling stations are typically staffed by volunteers. My grandma regularly works at the polls. She is in her late 80s and hard of hearing. I wouldn't expect her to notice a POST beep or recognize it if she heard it, and as far as I know staffers don't examine machines after every time somebody uses one.
How long does it take to go back from the root menu to the standard polling screen?
It looked like a pretty quick reboot from the main screen to the admin boot; I wouldn't expect it to take any longer the other way around.
Let's say the whole process -- compromise the machine, reboot, alter votes, reboot, put everything back together the way it was -- takes three minutes. I don't think that's likely to be enough extra time to arouse suspicion, especially in a crowded polling station. (You wouldn't do it in a sparsely-attended one, both because you'd attract more attention and because it would be more obvious that votes had been altered.)
And that's assuming attackers don't
want their attacks to be discovered. What if they do? Remember, Putin's strategy is to sow chaos and doubt. How difficult would it be for a dozen or so people to compromise a handful of voting machines in different parts of the country and do it in a way that's obvious enough that people notice it? Poll workers notice the machines have been tampered with; it gets on the news. Now the narrative is "Russia hacked the election," and you've gone and undermined confidence in the entire election, even if you didn't alter a single vote.
I guess I appreciate having a snapshot showing people that things are definitely not secure, and I'm not seeing this from the perspective of someone who doesn't get cold sweat from the mention of "voting by cell phone". But I tend to worry that when things like this steal the focus we end up with a push, and fix for just that one problem and not the real issues.
In terms of mitigation, there are some pretty clear steps to shore up
voting machine security.
If we're going to keep using electronic voting machines, that's the absolute minimum of precautions we need to put in place: make sure every single one of them prints out a voting sheet that is then put in a box and can be counted separately, and put more IT people on security to protect against shenanigans.
For my part, I'm pretty strongly in favor of going back to pen and paper. Some people need electronic voting machines for accessibility reasons, so we can't decommission them all. But my general belief is that if you're physically capable of using a pen and paper, that's how you should be voting.
