From
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Forget stuffing the ballot box — new concern is hacking voting machines
September 16, 2016
by Chris Potter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
(TNS) — Ever since Pennsylvania began using computerized voting machines a decade ago, critics have worried that hackers could throw an election by shifting votes from one column to another.
But that’s far from the only fear in 2016, a year when Illinois’ voter registration database has been hacked and Democratic Party emails were purportedly raided by Russian hackers.
“People have talked about Russia supporting Donald Trump,” said University of Iowa computer science professor Douglas Jones, who co-authored a 2012 book about election security. “But I think it would be to their advantage just to have a chaotic election, one that would weaken whoever won. … And if you wanted to cook an election, you don’t have to do anything massive.”
...
Concerns this year are more likely to focus on Pennsylvania. Two-thirds of its counties, including vote-rich Allegheny and Philadelphia, use touch-screen voting machines for which there is no paper ballot. If a hacker corrupted or deleted those machines’ vote counts, there would be no physical ballots to reference.
“There are six or 10 states that very heavily use paperless touch-screen machines” said Andrew Appel, a Princeton University professor who studies voting machine vulnerabilities. “Of them, Pennsylvania is the biggest swing state.”
Those machines, perhaps ironically, were bought as part of a national initiative to restore faith in voting after the 2000 election. ...
“I think it took us four or five minutes to reset the machine’s software with a Palm Pilot,” said Micah Sherr, a Penn researcher who now teaches at Georgetown University. ...
Allegheny County elections chief Mark Wolosik took such concerns in stride.
“I don’t want to have braggadocio,” he said, “but we’ve done extensive testing, and I haven’t seen any evidence that anything was tampered with.”
Among the tests: Before each election, a third-party firm pulls the “firmware” instructions hardwired into 20 randomly selected machines, ... All 4,600 machines run automatic trials to ensure they are tabulating correctly. Some are also tested manually.
On Election Day, randomly chosen machines are selected for a “parallel test” ...
...
Dave Eckhardt credits Wolosik for “going above and beyond what other people are doing.” But the Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist is vice president of advocacy group Vote Allegheny, which has long been wary of paperless machines. ...
“Motivated, trained people are attacking the U.S. every day,” he said. ...
Eckhardt and others prefer “optical scan” machines ...
...
Other officials using the iVotronic say they perform basic “logic and accuracy” tests, but not the more rigorous checks Wolosik oversees.
...
But the immediate priority is the existing machines. In light of the national hacks, the Department of Homeland Security offered to help states assess election threats, an invitation Pennsylvania’s Department of State has accepted. ...
Jones, the Iowa professor, said officials have to walk a tightrope, preparing for the worst without undermining public confidence.
“I get emails from the conspiracy fringe listing legitimate sources, including me, saying these aren’t potential weaknesses, but things that have already been exploited,” he said.
Even newspaper stories like this one risk sowing doubts when there is little time to address them.
...
©2016 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.