#2 All electronic voting equipment can easily be hacked because all such equipment must receive programming before each election from memory cards prepared on election management systems which are computers often connected to the internet running out-of-date versions of Windows. If a county election management system is infected with... malware, the malware can spread from that system to the USB drives, which then would transfer it to all the voting machines, scanners, and ballot-marking devices in the county. Most U.S. election systems are programmed by local county election officials or third-party vendors, who plug previously-used USB drives into computers connected to the internet before plugging those same USB drives into the optical scanners, tabulators, and voting machines that collect, count, and determine election results.show more

🚨BREAKING: Explosive video surfaces of FOX News stars Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity slamming Trump's "insane" voting machine fraud allegations as "absurd," "ridiculous," and "complete BS"!

#3 In 2019, the Associated Press reported that the vast majority of 10,000 election jurisdictions nationwide, including numerous swing states, were still using Windows 7 or older operating systems to produce ballots, program voting machines, count votes, and report results. Windows 7 officially reached its “end of life” on Jan. 14, 2020, meaning Microsoft stopped providing technical assistance or producing “patches” to address software vulnerabilities.

#4 Furthermore, not only are U.S. elections being programmed on computers running out-of-date software, but voting machine manufacturers have also installed remote-access software and wireless modems connecting voting machines directly to the internet. NBC News reported ten months before the 2020 election that ES&S, the largest U.S. election machine vendor, had installed at least 14,000 modems to connect their voting machines to the internet, even though many election security experts had previously warned that voting machines with modems were vulnerable to hackers.

#5 Dominion Voting Systems, the second-largest U.S. election machine vendor, which has given public presentations acknowledging their use of modems in their voting machines, was also discovered to be running remote-access software during the 2020 election: In Georgia, 20-year election worker, Susan Voyles, testified that Dominion Voting Systems employees “operated remotely” on her ballot-marking devices and poll pads after the team experienced some technical problems with their machines. In Wisconsin, the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), headed by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, also found that Dominion and ES&S voting machines were online and connected to the internet. In Michigan, attorney and Secretary of State candidate Matt Deperno, discovered a Telit LE910-SV1 modem chip embedded in the motherboard of an ES&S DS200 voting machine. Through these modems, hackers could theoretically intercept results as they’re transmitted on election night — or, worse, use the modem connections to reach back into voting machines or the election management systems to install malware, change software, or alter official results. Therefore, not only are hackers able to penetrate elections through vulnerable USB cards and election management systems but also through the very voting machines themselves.

#6 This isn’t a problem exclusive to elections — all computers are hackable — and that is why election security experts have always recommended the use of hand-marked paper ballots and rigorous post-election audits. This also isn’t a partisan issue; both Democrats and Republicans are well aware of the secrecy, privatization, and hackable hardware and software that runs America’s elections. After the 2016 election, Clinton supporters and the corporate media would spend the next four years talking about how compromised America’s computerized voting system was. Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Sen. Kamala Harris held numerous congressional hearings where they explained how easy it was to hack voting machines, how simple it was to locate unattended voting machines, and how numerous voting machines were connected to the internet. After the 2020 election, Trump supporters were censored and de-platformed (I was banned from Twitter) for pointing out the very same anomalies and vulnerabilities that Democrats and the corporate media had spent the last four years discussing. Regardless of politics, these problems are very real, they still exist today, and they are best explained by the computer scientists who have spent the last two decades researching them.

#7 Professor Matt Blaze of Georgetown University's Computer Science Department provided testimony on the vulnerabilities of the United States' election system during a congressional hearing titled "2020 Election Security" on January 9, 2020: “I come here today as a computer scientist who spent the better part of the last quarter century studying election system security… To be blunt, it’s a widely recognized really indisputable fact that every piece of computerized voting equipment in use at polling places today can be easily compromised in ways that have the potential to disrupt election operations, compromise firmware and software, and potentially alter vote tallies in the absence of other safeguards. This is partly a consequence of historically poor design and implementation by equipment vendors, but it’s ultimately a reflection of the nature of complex software. It’s simply beyond the state of the art to build software systems that can reliably withstand targeted attacks by a determined adversary in this kind of environment… Just as we don't expect the local sheriff to singlehandedly defend against military ground invasions, we shouldn't expect county election IT managers to defend against cyber attacks by foreign intelligence services.”

#8 Professor J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan's Computer Science Department provided testimony on the vulnerabilities of the United States' election system during a congressional hearing titled "Russian Interference in U.S. Elections" on June 21, 2017: “I’m a professor of computer science and have spent the last ten years studying the electronic voting systems that our nation relies on. My conclusion from that work is that our highly computerized election infrastructure is vulnerable to sabotage and even to cyber attacks that could change votes... I know America’s voting machines are vulnerable because my colleagues and I have hacked them repeatedly as part of a decade of research studying the technology that operates elections and learning how to make it stronger. We’ve created attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes. We’ve studied touch screen and optical scan systems, and in every single case, we’ve found ways for attackers to sabotage machines and steal votes… In close elections, an attacker can probe the most important swing states or swing counties, find areas with the weakest protection, and strike there. In a close election year, changing a few votes in key localities could be enough to tip national results.”

#9 Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University's Computer Science Department provided testimony on the vulnerabilities of the United States' election system during a congressional hearing titled "Election Cybersecurity" on September 28, 2016: “Installing new software is how you hack a voting machine to cheat. In 2009, in a courtroom of the superior court of New Jersey, I demonstrated how to hack a voting machine. I wrote a vote-stealing computer program that shifted votes from one candidate to another. Installing that vote-stealing program in a voting machine takes seven minutes per machine with a screwdriver. But really, the software I built was not rocket science. Any computer programmer could write the same code. Once it’s installed, it could steal elections without detection for years to come… Other computer scientists have demonstrated similar hacks on many models of machines. This is not just one glitch from one manufacturer of machines; it’s the very nature of computers. So how can we trust our elections when it is so easy to make the computers cheat?”

#10 Senator Ron Wyden provided testimony on the vulnerabilities of the United States' election system during a congressional hearing titled "Election Security" on July 15, 2019: "The vast majority of ten thousand election jurisdictions nationwide use election management systems that run on old software that is soon going to be out-of-date and ripe for exploitation by hackers, according to an exhaustive analysis by the Associated Press. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Arizona, and North Carolina, among others, are all at risk. Even the State of Georgia, which passed legislation to buy new voting machines, is on track to buy equipment that suffers from significant cyber security weakness. Our elections weren't secure last week, and they sure as heck aren't secure this week, and anybody who says otherwise is either selling you voting machines or simply has malicious intent towards our elections. 43% of American voters use voting machines that researchers have found have serious security flaws, including back doors. These companies are accountable to no one. They won’t answer basic questions about their cyber security practices. And, the biggest companies won’t answer any questions at all. Five states have no paper trail, and that means there is no way to prove the numbers the voting machines put out are legitimate. So much for cyber security 101."

#11 Senator Elizabeth Warren published an article on her website on the vulnerabilities of the United States' election system titled "Strengthening Our Democracy" on June 25, 2019: "The harsh truth is that our elections are extremely vulnerable to attack: Forty-two states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old. Laughably, in 2019, some still use Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Twelve states still use paperless machines, meaning there’s no paper trail to verify vote counts. Some states don’t require post-election audits. And ten states don’t train election officials to deal with cybersecurity threats."

#12 In Dec. 2019, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Ron Wyden, and Mark Pocan sent letters to the three private equity firms that own the largest voting machine companies in the US expressing their concern about the industry's "vulnerabilities" and "lack of transparency."

#13 Following Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 election, the corporate media dedicated the next four years to writing hundreds of articles about the extent to which the United States' election system is online, compromised, and vulnerable to hackers.

#14 The Guardian: Voting machine password hacks as easy as 'abcde' (April 15, 2015) “Touchscreen WinVote voting machines used in numerous elections between 2002 and 2014 used “abcde” and “admin” as passwords and could easily have been hacked from the parking lot outside the polling place, according to a state report… Anyone within a half mile could have modified every vote, undetected…the version of Windows operating on each of them had not been updated since at least 2004, that it was possible to “create and execute malicious code” on the WINVote and the level of sophistication to execute such an attack is low.”

#15 New York Times: Millions of Voter Records Posted, and Some Fear Hacker Field Day (Dec. 30, 2015) “First and last names. Recent addresses and phone numbers. Party affiliation. Voting history and demographics. A database of this information from 191 million voter records was posted online over the last week, the latest example of voter data becoming freely available, alarming privacy experts who say the information can be used for phishing attacks, identity theft and extortion. It is not known who built the database, where all the data came from, and whether its disclosure resulted from an inadvertent release or from hacks…states are not taking the security of voter data seriously enough.”

#16 Wired: America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets (Aug. 2, 2016) “They are old, buggy, and insecure. If someone wanted to mess with the US election, these machines would be an easy way in. Most of these machines are running Windows XP, for which Microsoft hasn’t released a security patch since April 2014…researchers have demonstrated that many of them are susceptible to malware or, equally if not more alarming, a well-timed denial of service attack.”

#17 Politico: How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes (Aug. 5, 2016) “Princeton professor Andrew Appel decided to hack into a voting machine… 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… the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the iPhones they use to navigate their way there. We found the machine did not have any security mechanisms beyond what you’d find on a typical home PC, it was very easy to hack…foreign hackers could attack the state and county computers that aggregate the precinct totals on election night…They could attack digitized voter registration databases…They could infect software at the point of development, writing malicious ballot definition files that companies distribute, or do the same on a software patch… They could FedEx false software to a county clerk’s office and, with the right letterhead and convincing cover letter, get it installed. Even with optical scan voting, it’s not just the voting machines themselves—it’s the desktop and laptop computers that election officials use to prepare the ballots, prepare the electronic files from the OpScan machines, panel voter registration, electronic poll books. And the computers that aggregate the results together from all of the optical scans.”

#18 CBS: Hacker demonstrates how voting machines can be compromised (Aug. 10, 2016) “Concerns are growing over the possibility of a rigged presidential election. Roughly 70 percent of states in the U.S. use some form of electronic voting. Hackers told CBS News that problems with electronic voting machines have been around for years. The machines and the software are old and antiquated. The voter doesn't even need to leave the booth to hack the machine. For $15 and in-depth knowledge of the card, you could hack the vote… There are so many places in the voting process once it goes electronic that's vulnerable. We found that more than 40 states are using voting machines there that are at least 10 years old.”

#19 ABC News: Yes, It's Possible to Hack the Election (Aug. 19, 2016) “Slight meddling in some swing precincts in swing states could tip the scales. If it’s a computer, it can be hacked… if sophisticated hackers want to get into any computer or electronic device, even one that is not connected to the internet, they can do so… In most states the data that are used to determine who won an election are processed by networked, computerized devices… There are almost no locations that exclusively use paper ballots… The process of recording which person got your vote can — almost always — be hacked. Malware can be implanted on voting machines. Almost none of these machines have any kind of malware detection software like those used at major corporations and government agencies. Even if they did, many of those cybersecurity tools are regularly defeated by today’s sophisticated hackers… In America’s often close elections, a little manipulation could go a long way… Smart malware can be programmed to switch only a small percentage of votes from what the voters intended. That may be all that is needed, and that malware can also be programmed to erase itself after it does its job, so there might be no trace it ever happened."

#20 The Atlantic: How Electronic Voting Could Undermine the Election (Aug. 29, 2016) “…computer-security experts think electronic voting is a very, very bad idea. For years, security researchers and academics have urged election officials to hold off on adopting electronic voting systems, worrying that they’re not nearly secure enough to reliably carry out their vital role in American democracy. Their claims have been backed up by repeated demonstrations of the systems’ fragility. When the District of Columbia tested an electronic voting system in 2010, a professor from the University of Michigan and his graduate students took it over from more than 500 miles away to show its weaknesses; with actual physical access to a voting machine, the same professor—Alex Halderman—swapped out its internals, turning it into a Pac Man console. Halderman showed that a hacker who has access to a machine before election day could modify its programming—and he did so without even leaving a mark on the machine’s tamper-evident seals…pure electronic voting is simply too dangerous: We must use paper, either directly filled out by the voter or as a voter verifiable paper audit trail…”

#21 FOX: Princeton Professor demonstrates how to hack a voting machine (Sept. 18, 2016) “I have demonstrated how to hack the AVC Advantage voting machines that we use in New Jersey... The touch screen voting machine, the type used in about ten states, can be tampered with... By simply swapping the machine's computer chip for his own... I figured out how to make a slightly different computer program that, just before the close of the polls, shifts some votes around from one candidate to another. I wrote that computer program onto a memory chip like this, and now to hack a voting machine, you have to get seven minutes alone with it, with a screwdriver.”

#22 Fortune: Watch This Security Researcher Hack a Voting Machine (Nov. 4, 2016) “Researchers at cybersecurity startup Cylance said they were able to hack into the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1, used to count votes in states including California, Florida, and New Jersey, and change the final tally it produced. In Cylance's hacking demonstration, researchers were able to alter the memory of the machine as well as the paper trail it created to change vote counts and precinct records. To pull off the hack, the researchers slipped in a custom PC memory card that overwrote software embedded in the device. Cylance said it had notified Dominion Voting Systems (née Sequoia), the voting machine's maker, and government authorities about the threat.”

#23 Vox: Here’s how hackers can wreak havoc on Election Day (Nov. 7, 2016) “Voting machines are old and vulnerable, and voter databases are connected to the internet. Many voting machines are running software that’s over a decade old, like Windows XP, which Microsoft hasn’t issued a security patch for since 2014. Others store ballots on memory cards, which could be used to insert viruses that can cause the machines to malfunction or alter votes. Take the Sequoia AVC Edge, for example, which is used in 12 states. It was hacked by a group of academics who installed malware that made the machine unable to do anything but play Pac-Man... Across the country, state voter registration data is synced with the internet; the integration has allowed people to register online or at the DMV. But it also means those databases are vulnerable to hackers… In Indiana last month, a security researcher demonstrated how he was able to quickly break into the state’s database and edit people’s voter information. Last year, another researcher found 191 million hacked voter registration records sitting on an open database that apparently anyone could find.”

#24 PBS: Here’s how hackers might mess with electronic voting on Election Day (Nov. 8, 2016) “…vulnerabilities in electronic ballots, make hacking a major possibility on Election Day… Five states — New Jersey, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina — will cast votes on digital systems without leaving a paper trail. The same applies to several jurisdictions in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Cyber vulnerabilities exist in all of these locations. Most revolve around the age of machines and their software. The Brennan Center report estimated 43 states will use voting machines in 2016 that are more than 10 years old. Many of these devices contain outdated software — think Microsoft Windows XP or older — without security updates. Meanwhile, the mainframes of other machines are guarded by easy-to-pick padlocks or by no barrier at all. With the kind of stealth and sophistication that’s already out there, why wouldn’t a nation-state, cyber-criminal gang, or activist group go into election systems that are completely vulnerable? …much of this voting technology is proprietary, so forensic auditors couldn’t independently scrub for and detect malicious software, especially given such code might delete itself after Election Day… Some counties use devices that collect and calculate results at once, such as the AccuVote TS and TSX voting machines. But the software for these popular machines lacks basic cybersecurity, like encryption or strong passwords. Marketplaces for voter registration data have sprouted on the Dark Web over the last year, according to an election hacking report from the ICIT. Prices vary, but one listing offered 0.5 Bitcoins ($300) for a single state’s database.”

#25 Slate: Now Is the Time to Replace Our Decrepit Voting Machines (Nov. 17, 2016) “With antiquated voting devices at the end of their projected lifespans still in widespread use across the country, the U.S. is facing an impending crisis in which our most basic election infrastructure is unacceptably vulnerable to breakdown, malfunction, and hacking... No one expects a laptop to run reliably for more than a decade. Yet on Election Day 2016, 42 states used voting machines that were at least 10 years old, and 13 of those states used ones more than 15 years old. Perhaps even more troubling, these aging machines are particularly vulnerable to hacking... These older devices often rely on unsupported software (we found machines still operating on Windows 2000) that doesn’t receive the regular security patches that help protect against modern methods of cyberattacks and hasn’t been through the relatively rigorous federal certification program that exists today. What’s more, many of these systems don’t have physical paper trails or ballots to back up the results, meaning there’s no way to independently verify how voters intended to cast their ballots in the case of a suspected hack. Voters complained of touchscreen calibration errors that “flipped” votes in North Carolina, Texas, Nevada, and Georgia and interfered with selecting straight party tickets in Pennsylvania. Optical scan machines malfunctioned in parts of Michigan and Massachusetts, and a few in Illinois had to be replaced because a memory card blew.”

#26 PBS: Recounts or no, U.S. elections are still vulnerable to hacking (Dec. 26, 2016) “Pennsylvania is one of 11 states where the majority of voters use antiquated machines that store votes electronically, without printed ballots or other paper-based backups that could be used to double-check the balloting. There’s almost no way to know if they’ve accurately recorded individual votes — or if anyone tampered with the count. More than 80 percent of Pennsylvanians who voted on Nov. 8 cast their ballots on such machines, according to VotePA, a nonprofit seeking their replacement. A recount would, in the words of VotePA’s Marybeth Kuznik, a veteran election judge, essentially amount to this: “You go to the computer, and you say, ‘OK, computer, you counted this a week-and-a-half ago. Were you right the first time?'” These paperless digital voting machines, used by roughly 1 in 5 U.S. voters last month, present one of the most glaring dangers to the security of the rickety, underfunded U.S. election system. Like many electronic voting machines, they are vulnerable to hacking. But other machines typically leave a paper trail that could be manually checked. The paperless digital machines open the door to potential election rigging that might not ever be detected. Researchers would like to see the U.S. move entirely to computer-scannable paper ballots since paper can’t be hacked. Many advanced democracies require paper ballots, including Germany, Britain, Japan, and Singapore. Wallach and his colleagues believe a crafty team of pros could strike surgically, focusing on select counties in a few battleground states where “a small nudge might be decisive,” he said…Vote-tallying systems, typically at the county level, are also tempting targets. They tend to be little more than PCs running a database. Tabulation databases at the county level, which collect results from individual precincts, are supposed to be “air-gapped” or disconnected from the internet at all times — though experts say they sometimes get connected anyway. They’re considered insecure for other reasons; many have USB ports where malware could be introduced. Forty-three states use machines more than a decade old. Most run on vintage operating systems such as Windows 2000 that pre-date the iPhone and are no longer updated with security patches.”

#27 Politico: U.S. elections are more vulnerable than ever to hacking (Dec. 29, 2016) “America's political system will remain vulnerable to cyberattacks and infiltration from foreign and domestic enemies unless the government plugs major holes and commits millions of dollars in the coming years… Hackers even invaded two state voter registration databases, spurring an FBI alert that sparked questions about whether a broader attack was coming. As for Election Day itself, 15 states — including swing state Pennsylvania — still rely at least partly on electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail. That’s despite years of warnings from digital security specialists, who say the touch-screen machines are prone to being hijacked and would provide no effective way to disprove claims of digital vote tampering… Democrats like Lieu say Republicans are playing with fire, warning the GOP could be in Russia’s crosshairs come 2018. And have no doubt, he added, foreign hackers “could absolutely swing an election” if the U.S. fails to lock its doors.”

#28 ScientificAmerican: Our Voting System Is Hackable by Foreign Powers (March 1, 2017) “It is entirely possible for an adversary to hack American computerized voting systems directly and select the next commander in chief. A dedicated group of technically sophisticated individuals could steal an election by hacking voting machines in key counties in just a few states. Indeed, University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman says that he and his students could have changed the result of the November election… It needn’t be a superpower like Russia or China. Even a medium-sized country would have the resources to accomplish this, with techniques that could include hacking directly into voting systems over the Internet, bribing employees of election offices and voting-machine vendors, or just buying the companies that make the voting machines outright. It is likely that such an attack would not be detected, given our current election security practices... We need to audit computers by manually examining randomly selected paper ballots and comparing the results with machine results. Audits require a voter-verified paper ballot, which the voter inspects to confirm that his or her selections have been correctly and indelibly recorded. Since 2003 an active community of academics, lawyers, election officials, and activists has urged states to adopt paper ballots and robust audit procedures…It is important that audits be performed on every contest in every election so that citizens do not have to request manual recounts to feel confident about election results."

#29 Politico: Will the Georgia Special Election Get Hacked? (June 14, 2017) “A 29-year-old former cybersecurity researcher with the federal government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Lamb, who now works for a private internet security firm in Georgia, wanted to assess the security of the state’s voting systems. When he learned that Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems tests and programs voting machines for the entire state of Georgia, he searched the center’s website… Lamb found on the center’s website a database containing registration records for the state’s 6.7 million voters; multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to a central server on Election Day; and software files for the state’s ExpressPoll poll books — electronic devices used by poll workers to verify that a voter is registered before allowing them to cast a ballot. There also appeared to be databases for the so-called GEMS servers. These Global Election Management Systems are used to prepare paper and electronic ballots, tabulate votes and produce summaries of vote totals. The files were supposed to be behind a password-protected firewall, but the center had misconfigured its server so they were accessible to anyone, according to Lamb. “You could just go to the root of where they were hosting all the files and just download everything without logging in,” Lamb says. The site was also using a years-old version of Drupal — content management software — that had a critical software vulnerability long known to security researchers. “Drupageddon,” as researchers dubbed the vulnerability, got a lot of attention when it was first revealed in 2014. It would let attackers easily seize control of any site that used the software. A patch to fix the hole had been available for two years, but the center hadn’t bothered to update the software, even though it was widely known in the security community that hackers had created automated scripts to attack the vulnerability back in 2014… In addition to failing to install the 2-year-old patch on its server software, Georgia, in testimony in the injunction hearing last week revealed, is still using a version of software on its touch-screen machines that was last certified in 2005. That voting software is running on the machines on top of a Windows operating system that is even older than this.”

#30 NPR: If Voting Machines Were Hacked, Would Anyone Know? (June 14, 2017) “U.S. officials are increasingly worried about how vulnerable American elections really are… But even if most voting machines aren't connected to the Internet, says cybersecurity expert Jeremy Epstein, "they are connected to something that's connected to something that's connected to the Internet." … A recently leaked National Security Agency report on Russian hacking attempts has heightened concerns. According to the report, Russian intelligence services broke into an election software vendor's computer system and used the information it gained to send 122 election officials fake emails infected with malicious software. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Russia might have attempted to hack into election systems in up to 39 states. University of Michigan computer scientist Alex Halderman says it's just the kind of phishing campaign someone would launch if they wanted to manipulate votes. "That's because, before every election, the voting machines have to be programmed with the design of the ballots — what are the races, who are the candidates," says Halderman. He notes that the programming is usually done on a computer in a central election office or by an outside vendor. The ballot program is then installed on individual voting machines with a removable memory card. "So, as a remote attacker, I can target an election management system, one of these ballot programming computers. If I can infect it with malicious software, I can have that malicious software spread to the individual machines on the memory cards, and then change votes on Election Day," says Halderman.”

#31 HuffPost: Good News For Russia: 15 States Use Easily Hackable Voting Machines (July 17, 2017) "Touch-screen machines can be programmed to change votes and are nearly impossible to audit, computer experts say… Manufacturers like Diebold touted the touch screens, known as direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, as secure and more convenient than their paper-based predecessors. Computer experts were skeptical since any computer can be vulnerable to viruses and malware, but it was hard to get ahold of a touch-screen voting machine to test it. The manufacturers were so secretive about how the technology worked that they often required election officials to sign non-disclosure agreements preventing them from bringing in outside experts who could assess the machines. In September 2006, they published a research paper and an accompanying video detailing how they could spread malicious code to the AccuVote TS to change the record of the votes to produce whatever outcome the code writers desired. And the code could spread from one machine to another like a virus. That was more than a decade ago, but Georgia still uses the AccuVote TS. The state is one of five ― the others are Delaware, Louisiana, New Jersey, and South Carolina ― that rely entirely on DREs for voting. Ten other states use a combination of paper ballots and DRE machines that leave no paper trail. Many use a newer version of the AccuVote known as the TSX ― even though computer scientists have demonstrated that machine, too, is vulnerable to hacking. Others use the Sequoia AVC Advantage, which Princeton professor Andrew Appel demonstrated could be similarly manipulated in a 2007 legal filing. Appel bought a Sequoia machine online for $82 and demonstrated that he could remove 10 screws and easily replace the Sequoia’s memory card with a modified version that would alter the outcome of an election… Computer scientists like Halderman, Appel, and Felten have been warning states about the risks of DRE machines for over a decade, urging them to replace touch-screen machines with paper ballots that can be read with an optical scanner and easily audited after an election. Paper ballots create a physical copy of the voter’s choice that can be checked against the results; with DRE machines, it’s impossible to verify whether the choice the person intended to select is, in fact, what the machine recorded.”

#32 CNET: Defcon hackers find it’s very easy to break voting machines (July 30, 2017) “When the password for a voting machine is "abcde" and can't be changed, the integrity of our democracy might be in trouble. The Advanced Voting Solutions WinVote machine, dubbed "America's worst voting machine," came equipped with this simple password even as it was used in some of the country's most important elections. AVS went out of business in 2007, but Virginia used its insecure machines until 2015 before dropping them for scrap metal. That means this vulnerable hunk of technology was used in three presidential elections, starting with George W. Bush's re-election in 2004 to Barack Obama's in 2012… "It's really just a matter of plugging your USB drive in for five seconds, and the thing's completely compromised at that point," Synack co-founder Jay Kaplan said. "To the point where you can get remote access. It's very simple." … Once you're out of the voting program on the machine, it's just like any old Windows XP computer," Synack found.