Election system susceptible to rigging despite red flags

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 researcher 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 voting to challenge results, claiming irregularities they blame on fraud, or human or mechanical errors.

"Nearly every election cycle in the county in recent memory has been plagued by a myriad of errors and complaints of wrongdoing," Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett wrote in a 2012 letter to the state comptroller recently obtained by The Associated Press.

On Nov. 8, election officials across the U.S. handled numerous complaints of aging touchscreens losing calibration and casting votes for the wrong candidate.

Congress appropriated $4 billion for election upgrades, and the states raced to replace punch cards and lever machines with digital technology.

Just as Congress delivered a death blow to punch cards, it should also outlaw paperless touchscreen voting machines and pay for their replacement, said Andrew Appel, a Princeton University computer scientist.

The clerk of Travis County, Texas, Dana DeBeauvoir, has been trying for a decade to build a bulletproof electronic voting system , because even the scanners that count paper ballots can be hacked.