Computer science expert to Senate Intel: voting technology highly hackable, could upgrade by 2018

J. Alex Halderman: Our voting structure is vulnerable to sabotage, even to attacks that can change votes Computer science professor whose research focuses on computer security and privacy has (with colleagues) studied voting machines and tested and verified that they can be hacked by foreign actors. "The key lesson from 2016 is that these threats are real." What needs to happen: * Upgrade old voting machines to new ones that have optical character recognition to recognize votes made on paper ballots. * Use those paper backups to verify the ballot count is accurate. * Harden voting systems against sabotage by applying cybersecurity best practices. We can upgrade our election infrastructure by 2018.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4674512/j-alex-halderman-voting-structure-vulnerable-sabotage-even-attacks-can-change-votes

A computer science professor told the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday that voting machines that create an electronic record of the voters' decisions are open to fraud and computer hacking, vulnerabilities that are big enough to potentially change the outcome of some elections.

J. Alex Halderman, professor of computer science at Michigan University, said he and his team began studying "direct-recording electronic" (DRE) voting machines 10 years ago and found that "we could reprogram the machine to invisibly cause any candidate to win. We also created malicious software — vote-stealing code — that could spread from machine-to-machine like a computer virus, and silently change the election outcome."

Halderman's testimony comes as the committee is trying to assess the scope of Russia's attempts to not only spread disinformation in the 2016 elections, but also its efforts to hack into U.S. voting systems.

As a computer science professor, Halderman has not only run academic trials on hacking voting machines, he has also run real-time examples.

"The one instance when I was invited to hack a real voting system while people were watching was in Washington D.C in 2010, and in that instance it took less than 48 hours for us to change all the votes and we were not caught," Halderman said about the experiment.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/computer-expert-some-voting-machines-can-be-directly-hacked/article/2626633

At least he is saying it CAN be upgraded by 2018. At least the Russia hacks are bringing awareness to just how vulnerable our election technology is. Many have been trying to call attention for years...it is good that finally this is coming out in hearings.

It would, however, take the political will of those in power to do it.