Voting machine firms lied about hacks, remote access

By PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/18/2018 - 2:32pm |

URL:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mb4ezy/top-voting-machine-vendor-admits-it-installed-remote-access-software-on-systems-sold-to-states

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Georgia: "According to Trump we weren't targeted" - well, that's reassuring.
Why Georgia's vote - both the generals & the Senate runoff - are entirely suspect:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/18/mueller-indictments-g...

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 4:35am

Sharing this and your others on election integrity around with whomever in my circles I can think of, trying to prod folks who, unlike me, have authority to take significant actions, to give urgent attention and figure out now just what they are going to do. It should not be difficult to identify any number of confidence-improving actions that could be taken by many others, even this close to the election and given all the essential election integrity stuff that should have been done long ago that has not been done.

Yet again, the issue is whether we are going to have free and fair, and therefore legitimate, elections in November, or not. (Perhaps many of our fellow citizens do not really care, in the end, which, if true, is deeply sad to some of us, and will increase the chances we lose the republic Franklin questioned whether we could keep.) If we do not, or if there is real legit reason to believe there has been tampering on a scale very plausibly influencing outcomes, temperatures are going to continue to rise and things could get uglier still. It seems to me that is entirely forseeable now. So there are no excuses for authorities to fail to act--informing the public as they do--to avert potential disasters and the risks of further deterioration of public confidence in our institutions, still possible.

Thanks for bird-dogging this issue and sharing stuff you're finding.

by AmericanDreamer on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 10:10am

"Facing One Troubling Russia Revelation After Another, Election Officials Work to Prevent a Digital 'Watergate'", Alan Greenblatt, Governing magazine online, yesterday

http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-state-election-trump-russia...

States are stepping up their election security but face many challenges: a president still skeptical of Russian interference, a lack of money, and reliance on private vendors for voting equipment and software, to name a few.

by Alan Greenblatt | July 18, 2018

\Many of the nation's secretaries of state were meeting in Philadelphia with federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials about election security last Friday when news broke that a dozen Russian agents had been indicted for interfering with the 2016 election.

"Obviously, this is on the forefront of our minds," says Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, who attended the meeting. "All 50 states and territories are focused on security."

But the indictments aren't the only bit of troubling news election officials have received in recent days.

Last week, Maryland officials announced that the FBI had informed them that ByteGrid LLC, an election vendor that handles the state's voter registration, election management and election night results sites, is financed by a fund whose manager is Russian and whose top investor is a Russian oligarch.

Over the weekend, a Russian woman named Maria Butina was arrested and appeared in court Monday on charges that she was a Kremlin agent who worked to infiltrate the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups in an effort to influence U.S. politics.

And on Tuesday, Vice reported that Election Systems & Software, a major voting machine manufacturer and software vendor, conceded in a letter to U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden that it had installed remote-access software on its machines between 2000 and 2006.

"Installing remote-access software and modems on election equipment is the WORST decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner," Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, tweeted on Tuesday. "Congress MUST pass my bill to require paper ballots and audits."

While taking these threats seriously -- and finding out new information on seemingly a daily basis about vulnerabilities to attack -- state and local election officials stress that they have made great strides in making voting systems safer over the past year and a half.

"We're certainly in much better shape than we were in 2016 across the country," says Condos, the new president of the National Association of Secretaries of State.

.........

by AmericanDreamer on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 12:49pm

Voting machine firms lied about hacks, remote access

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