The Vulnerabilities of our Voting Machines, and How to Secure Them
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
The security of voting has become a huge topic of concern. That’s especially true after 2020, when it became an article of faith for Donald Trump supporters that the election was somehow stolen by President Joe Biden. J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, has been studying voting machines and software for more than a decade. “We made a number of discoveries, including that [voting machines] had vulnerabilities that basically anyone could exploit to inject malicious software and change votes,” he tells the staff writer Sue Halpern. Conspiracy theories aside, he says, we must address those vulnerabilities in computerized voting. But hand counting ballots, advocated by some election skeptics, is not a plausible solution. “Perhaps as time goes on we’ll get Republicans and Democrats to agree that there are some real problems in election security that we would all benefit from addressing. ”
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| 1:11.9 | This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:21.1 | For years now, there's been a concern that computerized voting machines are somehow less secure than the old paper ballots we used. |
| 1:31.4 | What would happen if someone with ulterior motives got access to the software that counts the votes? |
| 1:37.5 | What kind of mischief could they do? |
| 1:39.8 | In May 2021, it happened. |
| 1:42.3 | And it happened through the person who was in charge of securing the votes, an election clerk in the state of Colorado. |
| 1:50.0 | In Mesa County, Colorado, the election clerk, a woman named Tina Peters, somehow got into her head months after the election of Joe Biden, that the election had been stolen |
| 2:04.3 | and that thousands of dead people had voted in the election that she was in charge of running. |
| 2:13.6 | Staff writer Sue Halpern has been reporting for us on election security, including the Tina Peters case. |
| 2:20.3 | And so she allowed Stop the Steel activist to come into her office and copy the Dominion voting system software that was running the tabulators that they used to count the votes in Mesa County. |
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