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For years, the safety researchers behind Defcon’s Voting Machine Hacking Village have been making an attempt to get lawmakers’ consideration on vulnerabilities with outdated election infrastructure. Hackers usually confirmed how simple it was to alter ballots with full entry to voting machines, with warnings that these safety vulnerabilities may shake the boldness of elections if there aren’t any paper backups.
Three years after it kicked off on the hacking convention in Las Vegas, the group lastly acquired the eye of the best workplace within the US. It solely took shedding the 2020 election by an estimated 5 million votes for President Donald Trump to get there.
On Nov. 14, Trump tweeted an NBC News phase from the hacking village in 2019 with none context — solely exhibiting the elements the place hackers have been capable of break into voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.
On Monday, he adopted up and wrote, “Dominion is running our Election. Rigged!”
Trump’s claims come from a collection of false conspiracy theories in regards to the voting machines switching votes to benefit President-elect Joe Biden, half of a broader push by Trump to undermine confidence within the election system and its outcomes. They come after the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of State Election Directors and members of the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council filed a joint assertion calling 2020’s election the “most secure in American history.”
“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary,” the joint assertion mentioned. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Several election officers have debunked the Dominion claims, together with Michigan’s secretary of state, Joceyln Benson, who launched a press release noting that although one county’s machines had flaws as a result of of human errors, the issue was rapidly mounted and would not have affected the election’s consequence.
Dominion Voting Systems has additionally rebuked Trump’s claims, with a Setting the Record Straight web page mentioning that the votes its machines tallied are fully auditable.
“No credible reports or evidence of any software issues exist,” Dominion Voting Systems mentioned in its assertion. “Human errors related to reporting tabulated results have arisen in a few counties, including some using Dominion equipment, but appropriate procedural actions were made by the county to address these errors prior to the canvass process.”
On Monday, a gaggle of 59 election safety consultants signed a letter saying they’ve discovered no credible proof of pc fraud with the 2020 election’s consequence, calling claims of a “rigged” election “simply speculation.”
The researchers, together with Defcon Voting Hacking Village co-founders Harri Hursti, Matt Blaze and Maggie MacAlpine, level out that the existence of vulnerabilities does not imply an assault occurred or altered the election’s consequence.
“In every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent,” the letter mentioned. “To our collective knowledge, no credible evidence has been put forth that supports a conclusion that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical compromise.”
Paper trails
The election officers are assured within the safety and outcomes of the election as a result of of paper audits of the votes. Though votes could possibly be digitally altered if a hacker had full entry to the machines, the paper ballots themselves can be rather more troublesome to alter.
The Voting Machine Hacking Village at Defcon has helped level out the various flaws with trusting know-how fully, and its organizers have known as on Congress for years to move laws that may enhance this paper path.
Trump had by no means tweeted about Dominion’s voting machines or the issues with voting know-how till after he misplaced the election. Lawmakers gave Trump lots of alternatives to enhance election safety throughout his presidency.
In 2018, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who’s additionally on the Senate intelligence committee, proposed an election safety invoice that may require paper ballots. It had been blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who later supported a $250 million election safety funding invoice that did not mandate paper ballots.
“Donald Trump is grasping for any possible excuse to avoid admitting he lost the election,” Wyden mentioned. “If Trump really cared about securing our elections, he would have embraced paper ballots and voting by mail, instead of spending months lying to the American people about them. I wrote, and the House passed, the toughest election security bill ever produced, which Mitch McConnell killed when it reached the Senate, and Trump didn’t lift a finger to save it.”
When Defcon first began taking a look at election infrastructure, in 2017, election officers and voting machine makers weren’t fast to embrace the strategy. Voting machine producers traditionally closed off entry to their {hardware}, stopping safety researchers from having the ability to check it for flaws.
The National Association of Secretaries of State additionally criticized how the village operated, noting that the researchers have limitless entry to voting machines, in contrast to throughout an precise election the place ballot staff can be awaiting tampering and paper audits would detect abnormalities.
But the village gave necessary perception involving switching to paper ballots. Virginia’s election officers modified the state’s methods to paper ballots in 2017 after hackers from Defcon demonstrated flaws with machines used within the state.
The village has additionally led the voting machine producers to alter their attitudes towards safety researchers. Dominion Voting Systems established its personal vulnerability disclosure coverage in 2019, permitting, for the primary time, safety researchers to tamper with its machines and report flaws.
At the Black Hat hacker convention in August, Election Systems & Software, the biggest maker of voting machines within the US, additionally introduced its personal vulnerability disclosure coverage.
In October, Iowa’s election officers launched the state’s personal vulnerability disclosure coverage by Bugcrowd, a bug bounty platform that lets hackers receives a commission for locating safety flaws. Casey Ellis, Bugcrowd’s founder, mentioned these packages served as “neighborhood watch for voting technology” and created transparency with election know-how points.
The identical approach that an unlocked door does not imply you have been robbed, vulnerabilities in software program don’t imply votes have been hacked. The level of the vulnerability disclosure packages is so corporations can repair these points, and use safe measures equivalent to paper audits.
“Election security experts are in an excellent position to explain that there is a very big difference between a vulnerability in an individual system, and vulnerabilities being covertly exploited at scale in order to rig an election,” Ellis mentioned. “It’s easy for the public to see footage of voting machines being torn apart and draw equivalency with the integrity of the election itself. This isn’t the case, and we’re the ones who are in the most objective position to explain this.”
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