America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets

America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets | WIRED
THIS WEEK, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump openly speculated that this election would be “rigged.”
...We’ve previously discussed the sad state of electronic voting machines in America, but it’s worth a closer look as we approach election day itself, and within the context of increased cyber-hostilities between the US and Russia. 
Besides, by now states have had plenty of warning since a damning report by the Brennan Center for Justice about our voting machine vulnerabilities came out last September.
Surely matters must have improved since then.
Well, not exactly.
In fact, not really at all.
...In many cases, those dated machines were replaced with electronic voting systems.
The intentions were pure.
The consequences were a technological train wreck.
“People weren’t thinking about voting system security or all the additional challenges that come with electronic voting systems,” says the Brennan Center’s Lawrence Norden. “Moving to electronic voting systems solved a lot of problems, but created a lot of new ones.”
The list of those problems is what you’d expect from any computer or, more specifically, any computer that’s a decade or older.
Most of these machines are running Windows XP, for which Microsoft hasn’t released a security patch since April 2014.
T...he extent of vulnerability isn’t just hypothetical; late last summer, Virginia decertified thousands of insecure WinVote machines.
As one security researcher described it, “anyone within a half mile could have modified every vote, undetected” without “any technical expertise.”
...The worst part about the current state of voting machines is that they don’t even require outside interference to undo an election.
“They’re all computers.
They run on tens of thousands of lines of code,” says Norden.
“It’s impossible to have a perfectly secure, perfectly reliable computer.”
...The problem is that not every state does post-election audits.
And even some that require them by law, namely Pennsylvania and Kentucky, don’t actually use voter-verifiable paper trails, meaning they have no way to complete an audit.
That suspicion is the real danger of electronic voting systems, and especially of those that can’t be easily or effectively audited.
If you can’t guarantee that there was no tampering—which not every state can—it might not matter if any actually took place. 
In the wrong hands, the doubt itself is damaging enough."