Skip to main content

Researchers hack e-voting machine, similar to 2012 Election Day machines

Voting machines that could be used by up to a quarter of the US electorate on Election Day next year can be hacked, says a group of computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. In fact, they’re not only saying it. They’ve done it.

A Salon report says that the hack can be performed “with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education.” Even more alarming, it’s believed that the hack, which could alter voting results, can be carried out without any trace of tampering having occurred.

The leader of the assessment team, Roger Johnston, said they believed such attacks were possible on a number of e-voting machines.

The hack was performed by the team on a Diebold voting machine, though two years ago the same group also managed a similar hack on a Sequoia e-voting machine.

The hack is performed by inserting a cheap electronic device into the e-voting machine. The device allows the machine to be controlled via a remote control unit at a distance of up to half a mile. The device could be put inside machines while they’re in storage prior to an election.

When the voter makes their selection and presses the Vote Now button, the person with the remote control can intercept and change the vote.

A member of the assessment team, John Warner, explained how carrying out the hack costs next to nothing. “The cost of the attack…..was $10.50 in retail quantities. If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that’s another $15. So the total cost would be $26.”

Despite the concerns raised by the team, touch-screen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines, or something similar, are scheduled to be used on Election Day in the US next year .

Sean Flaherty, a policy analyst for VerifiedVoting.org, a nonpartisan e-voting watchdog group, said that nearly all voters in states such as Georgia, Maryland, Utah and Nevada, as well as the majority of voters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas, will vote using DREs on November 6, 2012. Voters in cities such as Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh will also use them.

Johnston, the leader of the assessment team, told Salon: “The machines themselves need to be designed better, with the idea that people may be trying to get into them. If you’re just thinking about the fact that someone can try to get in, you can design the seals better, for example.”

He added: “This is a national security issue. It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security.”

[Image courtesy of fantazista / Shutterstock]

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more