Imagine identifying ways voting machines may be hacked. Then imagine discovering those vulnerabilities can’t be fixed before the Nov. 5 presidential election, according to a report.
That is the scenario that played out in Las Vegas over the weekend when some of the best hackers met to try to break into voting machines and, hopefully, help officials identify and fix those vulnerabilities, Politico reported.
However, they discovered any rectifying of glitches won’t come in time for the November election.
Every August, the DEF CON conference hosts the best hackers find problems in voting equipment. But nothing is implemented until the next election due to the complex process to fix the problem.
But this year’s election is viewed differently.
Part of that is due to concerns of foreign entities breaching the machines. The other part is due to President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
That claim has ultimately decreased confidence in the voting system with his supporters.
“As far as time goes, it is hard to make any real, major, systemic changes, but especially 90 days out from the election,” said Catherine Terranova, one of the organizers of the DEF CON “Voting Village” event.
She said that’s troublesome during “an election year like this.”
The event, which has been held every year for about a decade, found “multiple pages” of possible vulnerabilities, Voting Village co-founder Harri Hursti said.
Organizers of the Voting Village plan to put out a report about the findings from this cycle.
Hursti did not say the exact problems that were found, but said was consistent with those problems found previously.
In 2016, Russian hackers set their sights on damaging the Democratic presidential campaign and undermined voter registration databases in many U.S. states. This year, the presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump was hacked. The campaign blamed Iran.
“If you don’t think this kind of place is running 24/7 in China, Russia, you’re kidding yourselves,” Hursti said, referring to the hackers’ work with voting equipment. “We are here only for two and a half days, and we find stuff…it would be stupid to assume that the adversaries don’t have absolute access to everything.”
Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, posted about the issue on X, formerly Twitter, saying, “Uhh … what? Let’s use paper ballots!”
But any issues found can’t be fixed in the next three months leading to the election, which Voting Village organizers find frustrated.
“There’s so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening, so yes I’m worried about things not being fixed, but they haven’t been fixed for a long time, and I’m also angry about it,” Hursti said.
