The ugly truth about voting security: States won’t fix it

L33tdawg: If you're interested in voting machine security, you'll probably like this talk that's coming up in Dubai at the end of this month.

As those of you reading this from the US (hopefully) vote today, in all likelihood your vote will be counted correctly and you won't be turned away from the polls because someone hacked the voter registration data. Yet for a small but non-zero minority, something will go wrong that will stand in the way of their ability to cast a vote for the candidate of their choice. It could be a glitch in a voting machine interface that wasn't caught before they commit their ballot, voter registration data that has been flagged as incorrect or has been purged, or maybe a targeted robo-call that gives them bad information about the election.

There are lots of ways to manipulate the vote tally that go beyond exploiting a hiccup in an electronic voting machine. Denial of service attacks—on state or county servers, on the networks that connect precincts to election commissions, and on other vulnerable points in the network architecture—could disrupt voting itself or prevent votes from being properly counted. Tampering with voter registration data in advance of the election could cause voters to be forced to cast provisional ballots or exclude them from voting entirely. And then there's simply shoddy software implementation and aging hardware, which can cause an unintended denial of service.