Security experts say that Russian hackers have broken into the computers of not only the Democratic National Committee but other targets as well. This has raised a new wave of concerns that on Election Day, the votes themselves could be compromised by hackers, potentially tipping the results. Most states have returned to paper-backed voting systems in recent years, but that still leaves vulnerable a number of states that rely solely on machines. Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, tells NPR’s Scott Simon that without these paper-backed systems, up to 15 states could be putting their election results at risk. That’s a possible reach of 60 million voters — “enough to swing an election,” Tufekci says. In my old workplace — at Princeton University at the Center for Information Technology Policy — we had this lounging area with comfy couches, and researchers had decorated the place with a voting machine that had been hacked to play Pac-Man instead of counting votes. … And when they hacked this, the machine had been in use in jurisdictions around the country with more than 9 million voters.
The worry is, in a lot of states that are critical to the election — swing states — they don’t even have a paper trail that you can audit with. That’s really worrisome given how crucial elections are.
It’s not a straightforward thing, in the sense that the doomsday scenario where some foreign power or some domestic player hacks all of them, because the election machines we have are a patchwork of different systems. It’s kind of hard to pull off a centralized hack.
But let’s consider Georgia, which is running electronic-only machines — there’s no paper trail. … And the machines they’re using are more than a decade old, so the hardware is falling apart. And the operating system they’re using is Windows 2000, which hasn’t been updated for security for years, which means it’s a sitting duck. Georgia traditionally votes for the Republican presidential candidate. Now this year, some polls are suggesting a close race. And let’s assume there’s an upset and there’s a 1 percent win by Hillary Clinton, and let’s assume that people are objecting, because this is kind of unexpected. There’s no way to check.
Full Article: After DNC Hack, Cybersecurity Experts Worry About Old Machines, Vote Tampering : All Tech Considered : NPR.