US elections still vulnerable to rigging, disruption

Like many electronic voting machines, they are vulnerable to hacking.

What's more, their prevalence magnifies other risks in the election system, such as the possibility that hackers might compromise the computers that tally votes, by making failures or attacks harder to catch.

[...] like other voting machines adopted since the 2000 election, the paperless systems are nearing the end of their useful life — yet there is no comprehensive plan to replace them.

"If I were going to hack this election, I would go for the paperless machines because they are so hard to check," said Barbara Simons, a former IBM executive and co-author of "Broken Ballots," a history of the unlearned lessons of flawed U.S. voting technology.

Over the summer, hackers also tried to breach the voter registration databases of Arizona and Illinois using Russian-based servers, U.S. officials said.

Green Party lawyers seeking the Pennsylvania recount called the state's election system "a national disgrace" in a federal lawsuit, noting that many states outlaw paperless voting.

The U.S. voting system — a loosely regulated, locally managed patchwork of more than 3,000 jurisdictions overseen by the states — employs more than two dozen types of machinery from 15 manufacturers.

—After identifying battleground states, infect voting machines in targeted counties with malware that would shift a small percentage of the vote to a desired candidate.

Studies by Halderman, Wallach and others proved years ago that it's possible to infect voting machines in an entire precinct via the compact flash cards used to load electronic ballots.

Tabulation databases at the county level, which collect results from individual precincts, are supposed to be "airgapped," or disconnected from the internet at all times — though experts say they sometimes get connected anyway.

[...] it is not uncommon for candidates who have lost elections involving electronic vot