[Cryptography] Used election machinery?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sat, Jul 24, 2021 at 8:26 PM Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:

>
> Maricopa County, AZ, and Fulton County, PA - and possibly other
> locations as the year goes on - have had their voting machines, vote
> tally systems, routers, and other specialized bits decertified as a
> result of their chain of custody having been compromised.  These
> machines were turned over to private "auditors" who did not meet
> requirements for security, liability, and several other things, and as a
> result they can no longer be used in any future elections.
>
> Those counties (or states) bear the expense of replacing that machinery
> before the next election cycle, and the old machinery, while still
> functioning perfectly as far as anyone knows, and not even particularly
> obsolete, is now effectively useless to them.   No other county or state
> will buy and use equipment that has already been decertified.  So that
> equipment is likely to be sold on the secondary market to private
> citizens, or outright scrapped.
>
> I am of the opinion that this machinery should be acquired by security
> researchers who can do a real audit, not of any election in particular,
> but of the machinery itself.  To investigate its function and security,
> entirely without involving any real ballots that have been cast or real
> elections that have been decided and/or challenged.
>
> Generally the real questions address tiny parts of the process: does it
> correctly record votes? Is it possible to change votes?  Is it possible
> for a program to be left on it that will run and change votes later?
> Are the communications used secure?  Does it create a faithful paper
> ballot?  Is there any way to prevent it from creating a faithful paper
> ballot?  Is there any way to make it produce more than one paper copy of
> a ballot?    Would a paper copy of a ballot cast on the wrong machine or
> in the wrong year be counted in an audit?  Etc, etc, etc....  If,
> indeed, an entire election is needed to test some functions, then
> perhaps sneeches belonging to the star-bellied and non-starred parties
> can have an election to vote for butter-side-up or butter-side-down.
> With perhaps minority candidates "both", "neither", and "marmalade."
>

I have acquired a DIEBOLD ACCUVOTE TSX but I needed the boot media and
didn't have time to get it running.

The following site suggests ways to get started...

hackerhouse-opensource/electionhacking: Diebold Accuvote-TSx Election
Machine Hacking (github.com)
<https://github.com/hackerhouse-opensource/electionhacking>
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