Old electronics of US voting machines are no match for the Internet of Things
“Less than 80,000 votes – out of 10s of millions cast nationwide – in three key states swung the vote to now-President Trump,” notes James Clapper, former director of US National Intelligence. Clapper has “no doubt” that the Russian influence campaign swung the 2016 election to Trump.
But there is good reason to believe that this “influence” went beyond hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails and releasing them to support Trump’s campaign.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is still in its infancy and poorly understood by most people, including election officials. In August, computer scientist Carsten Schuermann demonstrated how it took him just minutes to hack into WinVote machines used for touch-screen voting in presidential elections in Virginia, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.
In front of a crowd at the Black Hat USA convention in Las Vegas, he showed that the old electronics of US voting machines are so out of date that a smart teenage gamer could potentially hack and alter the voting results.
Whether it’s the basic manual ballot vote, the electronic vote, the local vote counter, the electronic transfer to the state level or the further electronic transfer to the national level, the IoT makes it possible to alter at any level the vote numbers – and completely undetected.
There are however ways to beat the cheats! But this would require eliciting professional and technical opinion from the source of the now five-year-old IoT phenomenon. The source is a company called RF Controls, based in St Louis, Missouri and founded by Graham Phillip Bloy and Tom Ellinwood. Election officials might also like to consult with the primary purveyor of the IoT – Cisco Systems. Among others in the know would be IBM, AMD, Intel and AT&T. All would likely hem and haw over the IoT’s potential for serious mischief, but they know it has the capacity to alter election results, especially when the counting is done electronically.
A more detailed explanation of the dangers posed by IoT technology has been sent to the US Election Assistance Inspector General and the Office of Special Counsel (national whistleblower). It has also been passed to at least 150 Democrat and Republican national politicians.
Al Eberhardt
Bangkok
