Verified Voting in the News: Meet the e-voting machine so easy to hack, it will take your breath away | Ars Technica

Virginia election officials have decertified an electronic voting system after determining that it was possible for even unskilled people to surreptitiously hack into it and tamper with vote counts. The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. It used the easy-to-crack passwords of “admin,” “abcde,” and “shoup” to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively, according to a scathing security review published Tuesday by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. The agency conducted the audit after one Virginia precinct reported that some of the devices displayed errors that interfered with vote counting during last November’s elections.

Voting Blogs: Restaffed EAC Advances Voting Systems in First Meeting | Adam Ambrogi/Democracy Fund

At its first meeting on Tuesday, the new quorum of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) took an important, much-awaited step toward making the work of election officials easier and improving the voter experience around the country. For four years, the lack of a quorum of Commissioners blocked the accreditation of new voting system test laboratories, which meant only two facilities in the country were able to review the quality and accessibility of voting systems. Yesterday’s accreditation of a third test laboratory promises to help alleviate the looming risk of major voting machine problems that have worried many smart observers. Federally accredited labs commonly test products we use everyday, from toasters to children’s toys, to ensure they are safe. Similarly, to protect the legitimacy of our elections, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires the EAC to put voting machines through rigorous testing and certification.

Voting Blogs: A deep dive into voting systems | electionlineWeekly

While many Americans are familiar with some of the high-profile issues in voting and elections systems, not many are aware that some of the best and brightest computer science and engineering professionals are dedicated to finding improvements. As one can imagine, it is a major undertaking to bring the voting systems of a nation of 300 million citizens from punch cards to the latest technology of the 21st Century. Recently, U.S. Vote Foundation (US Vote) spoke with John P. Wack and Dr. Arthur M. Keller, members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Voting Systems Standards Committee (VSSC). Commonly referred to as VSSC/1622, their working group is building a common data format for election systems.

Voting Blogs: Should I Stay or Should I Go? States Weigh Future of Federal Voting System Certification | Election Academy

Day 2 of the EAC/NIST Future of Voting Systems Symposium was a deep, deep dive into the policies, procedures and process behind standard-setting at the federal level. The morning was devoted to a discussion about how federal standards are developed and how market players (especially vendors and consumers) conform to them. It was truly fascinating to hear how different standards work in practice, especially since the speakers were so enthusiastic and detailed about the subject. [My highlight of the morning was the discovery that low-flush toilets are tested using Japanese bean paste.] But it was in the afternoon, when the talk turned to voting system standards in particular, that things got interesting.