Star_Tropic t1_itsmpx7 wrote
A few elections ago I saw a post about a professor who every election would go around his section of the country to polling locations before election day to see if he could gain access to voting machines. He never broke into any rooms or snuck through security. Instead he would just walk into these locations through unlocked doors where no one was around to stop him. The machines were usually sitting in a dark room just waiting to be plugged in on election day. He never actually did anything but would just take a picture to show how easy it was.
Is this kind of early unfettered access to a voting machine a security issue?
Oscaruit t1_ittbd31 wrote
Sure the machines are sitting in minimally secured voting places. And usually they are already plugged in and charging. But they cannot be turned on without breaking seals and loading the election by entering passwords. And even if someone went in and ran up one or many votes overnight, when poll workers arrived they would notice the seals were broken and public/protected counts would be off. And in our case, there would be paper ballots in the bins of the tabulator. All red flags that would be immediately investigated. We would see it in the logs and it would be painfully obvious.
Natanael_L t1_itspouk wrote
It's not a good idea to leave them exposed, but ideally shouldn't bea huge risk. And with paper backups and audits that risk can be minimized.
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