The Vulnerabilities of our Voting Machines, and How to Secure Them

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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 Trump supporters that the election was somehow stolen by President Joe Biden. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at 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 of 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. ”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.7	For years now, there's been a concern that computerized voting machines are somehow less
0:19.6	secure than the old paper ballots we used. What would
0:22.3	happen if someone with ulterior motives got access to the software that counts the votes? What kind of
0:28.5	mischief could they do? In May 2021, it happened. And it happened through the person who was in charge
0:35.5	of securing the votes, an election clerk in the state of Colorado.
0:40.4	In Mesa County, Colorado, the election clerk, a woman named Tina Peters, somehow got into her head
0:48.4	months after the election of Joe Biden, that the election had been stolen and that thousands of dead people
0:58.0	had voted in the election that she was in charge of running.
1:04.0	Staff writer Sue Halpern has been reporting for us on election security, including the Tina
1:09.0	Peters case.
1:17.5	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
1:23.7	County.
1:25.2	Then they posted that information on the internet.
1:30.2	So essentially they released it into the wild for anyone to take a look at
1:35.6	and potentially try to figure out if there were any vulnerabilities.
1:41.1	If a hacker would like to get into these systems, they now basically have the key to the castle.
1:50.8	Dominion is one of the big voting machine companies.
1:53.5	You, of course, remember that they were the target of far-out conspiracy theories involving George Soros and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, all pushed by
2:03.2	Trump's lawyer, Sidney Powell, among others. And the theft of the software in Colorado was not an
2:08.8	isolated incident. Unfortunately, this has happened in a number of other jurisdictions around the country, often in swing states,
	...

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