VOTING MACHINES HACKED IN LAS VEGAS

August 1, 2017

In January 2017, Nevada Secretary of State, Barbara Cegavske, declared there was no voter fraud in the entire state of Nevada in the 2016 election cycle. But this week at the annual DEF CON cyber security conference held in Las Vegas, the hackers demonstrated how easy it is to hack into our voting machines.

The Hacker Conference purchased some 30 voting machines off eBay and publicly let the attendees hack the machines. Every single machine was successfully hacked. Some of the machines had default pass words available online on the manufacturer’s website. One voting machine’s password was set to ABCD. In some cases, hackers were able to simply Google passwords for voting machines.  It took one Hacker just 90 minutes to hack in and vote remotely on one of the machines.

But the one thing that provides some comfort is that voting machines are not connected to the internet. So that means Russia or any other hostile actor cannot remotely access the voting machines. But they could access them at the voting booths.

The Nevada legislature just authorized the Nevada Secretary of State to purchase brand new voting machines this year. So let’s hope the new machines have more software security than the old ones.