Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voting Machine

Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by rhino369 on Thursday November 24, 2016 @03:37PM (#13032612)

You are still using a voting machine, but you've just introduced a shitty paper input that needs to be scanned into the machine. The counting machine is a voting machine. It can be hacked.

The only benefit is that you have a paper record that can be corroborated if there is evidence of hacking later. But we could do a printout paper record on voting machines too.

You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by dghf on Thursday November 24, 2016 @05:25PM (#13033164)

> You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error.

In the UK's 2014 elections for the European Parliament, a Scottish voter wrote against the four parties/candidates listed: "wank"; "wank"; "good guy"; "wank".

The vote was deemed valid as the voter had expressed a clear preference.

(Source: https://twitter.com/JamieRoss7/status/473068708441894912/pho...)

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by brassic on Thursday November 24, 2016 @06:05PM (#13033349)

There was another case where the voter drew a penis next to the conservative candidate and it counted as a vote:

http://www.itv.com/news/wales/update/2015-05-08/angry-voter-...

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by Symbiote on Thursday November 24, 2016 @04:06PM (#13032764)

Ballots are counted by hand in the UK.

There are pictures and a description here: http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-england-32533064

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by rhino369 on Saturday November 26, 2016 @12:51AM (#13041946)

Yikes that is even worse. Hand counts have been shown to be off by 1-2%.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by hacker_9 on Thursday November 24, 2016 @04:07PM (#13032767)

Actually in the UK votes are counted manually by people in big halls under watch by accredited observers. No voting machine in the process at all.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by robryan on Thursday November 24, 2016 @03:57PM (#13032711)

Sure that happens to a small portion, if the result is close enough though you can go back over them by hand.

The difference is that the voting machine makes it possible to hack the paper trail.

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Re:Edward Snowden Demonstrates How Easy It Is to Hack a Voti... by RCortex on Thursday November 24, 2016 @03:43PM (#13032642)

Please post a source or more of an explanation before spreading FUD like this...

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