Can You Hack an Election in 7 Minutes?

Can an election be hacked in seven minutes?

Andrew Appel, a professor at Princeton University set out to do just that, hack into a voting machine. In order to do this he could have tried traditional ways of hacking or writing malware to sneak on to a machine at a polling place that are left unguarded for days, but he decided it was much easier to just buy one online.

For the cost of a whole $82, Appel became the proud owner of a behemoth machine called Sequoia AVC Advantage. This machine is one of the oldest and most vulnerable in the US and is unfortunately used in places like Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

 

Politico Reports:

No sooner did a team of bewildered deliverymen roll the 250-pound device into a conference room near Appel’s cramped, third-floor office than the professor set to work. He summoned a graduate student named Alex Halderman, who could pick the machine’s lock in seven seconds.

Clutching a screwdriver, he deftly wedged out the four ROM chips—they weren’t soldered into the circuit board, as sense might dictate—making it simple to replace them with one of his own: A version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine’s results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. The attack was concluded in minutes.

To mark the achievement, his student snapped a photo of Appel—oblong features, messy black locks and a salt-and-pepper beard—grinning for the camera, fists still on the circuit board, as if to look directly into the eyes of the American taxpayer: Don’t look at me—you’re the one who paid for this thing.

 

Appel’s mischief might be called an occupational asset: He is part of a diligent corps of so-called cyber-academics—professors who have spent the past decade serving their country by relentlessly hacking it.

Electronic voting machines—particularly a design called Direct Recording Electronic, or DRE’s—took off in 2002, in the wake of Bush v. Gore. For the ensuing 15 years, Appel and his colleagues have deployed every manner of stunt to convince the public that the system is pervasively unsecure and vulnerable.

Beginning in the late ’90s, Appel and his colleague, Ed Felten, a pioneer in computer engineering now serving in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, marsha led their Princeton students together at the Center for Information Technology Policy (where Felten is still director).

There, they relentlessly hacked one voting machine after another, transforming the center into a kind of Hall of Fame for tech mediocrity: reprogramming one popular machine to play Pac-Man; infecting popular models with self-duplicating malware; discovering keys to voting machine locks that could be ordered on eBay.

Eventually, the work of the professors and Ph.D. students grew into a singular conviction: It was only a matter of time, they feared, before a national election—an irresistible target—would invite an attempt at a coordinated cyberattack.

There is no singular national body that regulates the security or even execution of what happens on Election Day, and there never has been. It’s a process regulated state by state.

The Princeton group has a simple message: That the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the iPhones they use to navigate their way there. They’ve seen the skeletons of code inside electronic voting’s digital closet, and they’ve mastered the equipment’s vulnerabilities perhaps better than anyone (a contention the voting machine companies contest, of course).

They insist the elections could be vulnerable at myriad strike points, among them the software that aggregates the precinct vote totals, and the voter registration rolls that are increasingly digitized. But the threat, the cyber experts say, starts with the machines that tally the votes and crucially keep a record of them—or, in some cases, don’t.

Cleary hacking into voting machines is an easy task, which is a major concern for our democracy. If powerful people with money and resources want to stay in control, we now know they can make that happen very easily.

Full story at Politico.

 

A Who’s Who of Legal Minds Arranged As Campaigns Prepare For Voter Fraud

Biden’s campaign told Fox News Monday that they have “created the largest election protection program in presidential campaign history.” It involves legal, communications and political strategies in anticipation of an ”unprecedented” election. Strategies include supporting election jurisdictions, voter education to raise awareness of the options they have and “aggressive responses to vote suppression activities, and robust programs for identifying and countering foreign interference and misinformation from foreign or domestic sources” reported Fox News.

A national team for “special litigation” was also developed to focus on state-by-state protection of voter access to polls and a “fair and accurate vote count. Leading the outreach program is Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General under the Obama administration. The Biden campaign source said despite the legal team they are putting together with hundreds of lawyers, thousands of lawyers and volunteers are involved in the overall voter protection program.

Similarly, Republicans have formed a “Lawyers for Trump” coalition aimed at protecting the “integrity” of November’s elections. “Democrats are working to shred election integrity measures one state at a time and there’s no question they’ll continue their shenanigans from now to November and beyond,” said Trump campaign general counsel Matthew Morgan.

“Lawyers for Trump” has some heavy hitters from the GOP and “Trump allied-attorneys like former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Attorney General Ed Meese and the president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani” according to Fox News. Their agenda is to “Protect the Vote” for fear that “Democrats are trying to use coronavirus and the courts to legalize ballot harvesting, implement a nationwide mail-in ballot system, and eliminate nearly every safeguard in our elections.”

It is no secret Democrats are preparing for battle in the event of a Trump re-election. Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton has already lent her two cents to Biden. She told him not to concede an election loss under “any circumstance.”

Let’s hope the American voters pick our next president, not a battle of the wits amongst legal minds.