http://www.wired.com/2015/08/virginia-finally-drops-americas-worst-voting-machines/
By Kim Zetter
Security
Wired.com
08.17.15
IF YOU VOTED in a Virginia election any time between 2003 and April of
this year, your vote was at serious risk of being compromised by hackers.
That’s the assessment reached by Virginia’s board of elections, which
recently decertified some 3,000 WINVote touchscreen voting machines after
learning about security problems with the systems, including a poorly
secured Wi-Fi feature for tallying votes.
The problems with the machines are so severe that Jeremy Epstein, a
computer scientist with SRI International who tried for years to get them
banned, called them the worst voting machines in the country. If the
WINVote systems weren’t hacked in a past election, he noted in a recent
blog post and during a presentation last week at the USENIX security
conference, “it was only because no one tried.”
The decision to decommission the machines, which came after the state
spent a decade repeatedly ignoring concerns raised by Epstein and others,
is a stark reminder as the nation heads into the 2016 presidential
election season that the ongoing problem of voting machine security is
still not taken seriously by election officials. Virginia officials only
examined the WINVote systems after Governor Terry McAuliffe tried to vote
with one during the state’s general elections last November. Dismayed at
the problems he encountered first hand trying to select a candidate in a
Senate race, he demanded an investigation. But even after serious
vulnerabilities were then uncovered, some election officials argued
against replacing the machines. Richard Herrington, secretary of the
Fairfax City Electoral Board, asserted that no voting system was secure.
[...]
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