“Electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking if unaddressed, the nation’s leading cybersecurity agency says in an advisory sent to state election officials.” So reported Associated Press on May 31 regarding an “advisory” issued by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) to state officials. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the document, which has not yet been released to the public.

The CISA advisory, reports AP, focused on Dominion Voting Systems and “details nine vulnerabilities and suggests protective measures to prevent or detect their exploitation.”

According to the AP article, the advisory is based on a report by Professor J. Alex Halderman, a renowned computer scientist at the University of Michigan, who, along with his students, is famous for “white hat” computer hacking that has exposed major security vulnerabilities in personal, commercial, and government computer systems. The AP report notes that “Halderman has long argued that using digital technology to record votes is dangerous because computers are inherently vulnerable to hacking and thus require multiple safeguards that aren’t uniformly followed. He and many other election security experts have insisted that using hand-marked paper ballots is the most secure method of voting and the only option that allows for meaningful post-election audits.”

“These vulnerabilities, for the most part, are not ones that could be easily exploited by someone who walks in off the street, but they are things that we should worry could be exploited by sophisticated attackers, such as hostile nation states, or by election insiders, and they would carry very serious consequences,” Halderman told the AP.

The vulnerabilities that worry Dr. Halderman are the same weaknesses that election expert Colonel Kurt Hyde and Dr. Douglas Frank have been warning about concerning the 2020 presidential election. Col. Hyde, an elections historian and former adjunct professor of systems analysis, was one of the earliest critics of electronic voting, pointing…