Pennsylvania: York County details lack of internal controls in post-election report to state | York Dispatch

York County’s voting machine programming error was the result of a failure to establish and execute proper internal controls, according to a post-election report submitted to the state. A technical oversight by the county’s elections department allowed a single voter to cast multiple votes for a single candidate during the Nov. 7 general election in certain races where more than one candidate was elected. The Pennsylvania Department of State directed the county to review and explain the issue to them, which county solicitor Glenn Smith did in a report submitted Nov. 27.

Verified Voting Blog: Which voting machines can be hacked through the Internet?

Over 9000 jurisdictions (counties and states) in the U.S. run elections with a variety of voting machines: optical scanners for paper ballots, and direct-recording “touchscreen” machines.  Which ones of them can be hacked to make them cheat, to transfer votes from one candidate to another?

The answer:  all of them.  An attacker with physical access to a voting machine can install fraudulent vote-miscounting software.  I’ve demonstrated this on one kind of machine, others have demonstrated it on other machines.  It’s a general principle about computers: they run whatever software is installed at the moment.

So let’s ask:

  1. Which voting machines can be hacked from anywhere in the world, through the Internet?  
  2. Which voting machines have other safeguards, so we can audit or recount the election to get the correct result even if the machine is hacked?

The answers, in summary:

  1. Older machines (Shouptronic, AVC Advantage, AccuVote OS, Optech-III Eagle) can be hacked by anyone with physical access; newer machines (almost anything else in use today) can be hacked by anyone with physical access, and are vulnerable to attacks from the Internet.
  2. Optical scan machines, even though they can be hacked, allow audits and recounts of the paper ballots marked by the voters.  This is a very important safeguard.  Paperless touchscreen machines have no such protection.  “DRE with VVPAT” machines, i.e. touchscreens that print on paper (that the voter can inspect under glass while casting the ballot) are “in between” regarding this safeguard.

The most widely used machine that fails #1 and #2 is the AccuVote TS, used throughout the state of Georgia, and in some counties in other states.

Verified Voting Blog: What if Volkswagen made Voting Machines?

Volkswagen stock plummeted today, because of accusations by the Environmental Protection Agency that VW uses software that turns on its emission control device when the software detects that one of its diesel cars is undergoing emission testing. When not being tested, the software disables the device, thereby causing the car to spew as much as 40 times the pollution limit of the Clean Air Act.

Like VW cars, modern voting machines contain software that is tested before use in elections. It would not be difficult to write voting machine software that would, like the VW software, know when it is being tested, and thus behave correctly during testing but not during an actual election. If such behavior were detected after an election, the vendor stock would plummet, but so would voter confidence in the outcome of the election. Furthermore, in the case of some voting systems that cannot be legitimately recounted, such as paperless voting machines or online votes, there would be no way to determine after the election if the declared winners were the actual winners.