PBS: An 11-year-old changed election results on a replica Florida state website in under 10 minutes

[Ms. Toad]

82. No. They are just demonstrating a single hack - and expecting readers not to ask the questions

that are obvious to any person with experience in elections and programming.

In August, the Def Con conference in Las Vegas ran a "Voting Village", where participants were encouraged to uncover flaws in US election infrastructure by hacking into various computer systems

It is trivial to hack a single voting machine, when you are given the machine and no restrictions on gaining access to the machine. The actual hack has to be surreptitious - and be carried out nearly simultaneously on hundreds or thousands of machines. That is what makes it virtually impossible.

The organisers of the conference argue that because the unit is designed to process a high volume of ballots, hacking one of the machines could enable an attacker to "flip the electoral college and determine the outcome of a presidential election​".

Could hacking one machine change the numbers? Sure. But hacking one of the machines would produce data so anomalous that it would be blatantly obvious. To be successful (i.e. carried out and not immediately detected), you would need to shift a few votes in each precinct - i.e. multiple machines.

Other machines tested include the AccuVote TSx, currently used by 18 US states. The system includes a smart card reader for users to cast votes, which the report says can be easily disconnected to "disrupt the election" process.

Attendees of the conference were also able to reprogramme voting smart cards wirelessly, using mobile phones.

First disruption is not the same as changing votes - and would have been obvious had it happened during an election, and the results would have been unpredictable. It would have a similar, but less refined, effect as voter purges (voter purges impact a targeted population; disruption would impact everyone in a particular voting location equally)

Second the smard card is essentially a key - it contains virtually no data, other than what is needed to lock/unlock the machine and pull up the correct ballot form. The most that could be done would be to set it from voted to not voted - or to pull up a different ballot than the one for which it was originally programmed, in order to register a second or third vote.

But since the number of voters is stored separately, a machine that registered more voters than actually voted would be flagged during the post-election audit and publically reported. Further, anyone taking double or more time to vote would be interrupted. In some places there are strict time limits, but in every precinct in which I've served as an observer, someone taking the extended time necessary to cast multiple ballots (or interrupting the process to reprogram the card from voted to not voted) would be noticed.

I am not disputing that machines can be hacked. Any machine can be hacked.

What is nearly impossible would be for there to have been the massive conspiracynecessary to carry out the hack on thousands of machines and kept it secret for a minimum of 14 years.

No one, including the experts you have cited have even come close to outlining a full scale plan that could be secretly carried out, with few enough participants to keep it secret, with no public slip-ups. They demonstrate - essentially a magic trick (in which they don't even bother to make their sleight of hand invisible) and then expect me (with nearly 2 decades of experience in most aspects of elections - and others similarly situated) to believe that thousands of people could carry out the same magic trick - while making their sleight of hand completely invisible in order to avoid detection - and not a single participant slipped up, or told their spouse, child, neighbor, local barkeep, etc.

It just doesn't pass the laugh test.