Tag Archive for: voting

Henderson County elections director answers if it is possible to hack local voting machines

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Scenes from 2022 early, one-stop voting in Henderson County.

Scenes from 2022 early, one-stop voting in Henderson County.

Henderson County Elections Director Karen Hebb discussed with the board of commissioners Monday night whether or not it is possible to hack local voting machines.

Chair Bill Lapsley said the commissioners have been asked about whether or not hacking the machines is possible. At the beginning of the commissioners’ meeting, Henderson County resident Karl Gessler called the election machines untrustworthy and said recent elections have been rigged. He requested that the commissioners “not pay for election-rigging machines.”

“One of the questions that we get asked on occasion is does our elections board staff check to make sure no one is hacking into our election machines,” Lapsley said to Hebb. “That to me is a very serious insinuation, and I would like to hear from you that you are aware of that charge and that you do whatever is necessary to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“First off, there is no way to hack into our machines,” Hebb said. “There is no modem, there is no way that you can access the machine.”

“Once the machine reads the ballot, it stores the information on a thumb drive. We take that thumb drive out after the polls are closed and upload to a computer that has never been hooked to the internet. The information is then placed on another thumb drive that is taken to a separate computer and uploaded to the state and then that thumb drive is never used again,” she said.

“So, there is no way that anyone can get into our machines or get into our coding because it is never hooked to the internet, and there is no way it can be hacked,” according to the elections director.

“We keep all of our machines in a locked cage… we have a lock that is accessed with your thumb, so only employees are able to come into where our machines are kept; our programming room is always locked when we are not using it, so we try everything we can to make sure there is double security as far as the machines go and it cannot be accessed,” said Hebb.

Scenes from 2022 early, one-stop voting in Henderson County.

Scenes from 2022 early, one-stop voting in Henderson County.

Vice Chair Rebecca McCall asked Hebb if random audits, such as hand counts…

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Federal Cyber Officials Admit: Dominion Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking, Fraud

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“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…

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US Internet Agency discovers weaknesses in voting machines

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(MENAFN) According to a national cyber watchdog, electronic voting machines used in at least 16 states have security issues that hackers may exploit, rising additional doubts about the software following claims of rampant fraud and manipulation in the 2020 presidential election.

The Associated Press got a study from the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) on Tuesday that revealed nine severe flaws in Dominion Voting Systems equipment, indicating they might be vulnerable to hacking if not rectified.

The agency’s executive director, Brandon Wales, informed the Associated Press that CISA had no proof that the security weaknesses had ever been utilized to sway election outcomes, “states’ standard election security procedures would detect exploitation of these vulnerabilities and in many cases would prevent attempts entirely.”

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Hired ‘hackers’ fail to disrupt Brazil voting system

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BRASILIA, Brazil — More than 20 would-be hackers gathered in the Brazilian electoral authority’s headquarters in the capital last week. Their mission: infiltrate the nation’s voting system ahead of a race in October.

Their three-day battery of attempted assaults ended Friday and was part of planned testing that happens every election year, usually proceeding without incident or drawing any attention. But with President Jair Bolsonaro continuously sowing doubt about the system’s reliability, the test took on an outsized significance as the electoral authority, known as the TSE, seeks to shore up confidence in the upcoming general elections.

Analysts and members of the TSE said the test’s results were more encouraging than ever. All the experts attempting to disrupt the system — among them federal police agents and university professors in engineering, information technology, data security and computer science — had failed.

“No attack managed to alter the destination of a vote in the electronic ballot,” Julio Valente da Costa, the TSE’s secretary of information technology, told reporters in an interview afterward.

“The importance of this test is for us to rest assured, at least about all the technology and computing components for the elections.”

When Bolsonaro won the presidential race four years ago, he claimed he had actually secured victory in the first round, not the runoff weeks later.

The former army captain has repeatedly made accusations the voting system used for three decades is vulnerable, and at times said he possesses proof fraud occurred, but has never presented any evidence.

Last year, Bolsonaro suggested the election could be canceled unless a voting reform was passed in Congress, but the proposed constitutional change did not garner enough votes.

Analysts and politicians have expressed worry that far-right Bolsonaro, who is trailing leftist former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in all early polls, is laying the groundwork to follow the lead of his ally, former U.S. President Donald Trump, and reject election results.

The TSE has gone to great lengths to bring more openness to the electoral process, even inviting the armed forces to sit on its transparency…

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