Then there are tech advancements that make the computer scientists shudder: To a person, they each warned me about the public’s new delusion, one strikingly reminiscent of the aftermath of Bush v. Gore—Internet voting. As Halderman’s work began to garner more attention, he sensed a new trend around the idea of voting online. With its lack of technical probity, an argument hanging entirely on convenience, and a stampede of purveyors from for-profit cyber companies, Halderman and others saw a facsimile of the voting machine companies they had sought to marginalize just years earlier. Yet elected officials found appeal in many of the same arguments. “In this world, we do so many things now online,” Appel says, explaining the popularity of the idea. “You’re banking online. You order coffee online. Somebody who’s used to living so much of their life online will wonder why we’re not voting online.”
But Appel, and the others, share a categorical warning: “It would be a disaster,” he tells me. “Anyone could hack in. The Russians, the North Koreans, anyone who wishes.”
Like the voting machine companies, Internet voting services—mostly purveying their software in private or corporate elections—largely resist subjecting their work to public trial. That changed when, in 2010, the District of Columbia announced its intention to launch a citywide Internet voting platform, intended for overseas voters and a milestone for the concept. Just a month before the midterm elections in November, the District conducted a test drive. “It’s not every day, of course, that you’re invited to hack into government computers without going to jail,” Halderman says, muffling a giggle. “We didn’t want to let this opportunity, to have this be a realistic simulation of an attack, go to waste.”
On October 1, 2010, two employees in the Washington, D.C.-based Office of the Chief Technology Officer, stormed down a hallway and charged through the double-doors that opened into the basement-floor server room. Earlier that day, they had learned strange news: Someone had called into the hotline to report a bug on the board’s paperless ballot system. The program seemed to play obnoxious brass-band music each time subjects submitted their ballot. The names on the ballots had all been changed to villainous robots: Bender for State Board of Education (from Futurama); Hal 9000 for Council Chairman (from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Then they learned that the hackers were likely watching them on the closed-circuit circuit feed, through the camera that was gazing down at them, right now.
Some 520 miles away, the scene played on a screen in the hacker’s cramped headquarters. A whiteboard behind the computer declared a series of instructions in brown and purple marker, each skewered with a squiggly strike-through, followed by a perfunctory checkmark: “Replace old ballots.” Check. “Steal temp ballots. Check. “Rig to replace new ballots.” Check. The hackers exchanged high-fives in adulation. And when the D.C. tech officers’ faces appeared on the screen, Alex Halderman peered back.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144#ixzz4ITm5XQRw
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