The power of the US voting order, according to retired FBI director James Comey, is that it’s “clunky” each and every state and usually every area can determine its own structure and whether to use document or electronic machines. And there are above a dozen various manufacturers providing voting machines to elective districts. While that clunkiness helps limit large-scale voter hacking, it presents more possibilities for hackers to obtain polling data.When US administration workers decommission old balloting equipment and sell them off to the public, they’re assumed to wipe voter data from the device’s memory.
But hackers provided access to an ExpressPoll-5000 automated poll book the class of device used to control in voters on Election Day has found the personal records of 654,517 people who voted in Shelby County, Tennessee.
It’s unclear how much data of the personal information wasn’t yet public. Some of the documents, viewed by Gizmodo at the Voting Village, a compilation of real, used balloting machines that anyone could botch with at the DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas, incorporate not just name, address, and birthday, but also political party, whether they voted absentee, and whether they were required to provide identification.
Election Systems and Software (ES&S), which does the ExpressPoll-5000, is an example of the most common e-poll book producers in the country, said Barbara Simons, who sits on the committee of Verified Voting, an independent research organization that advocates for voting-machine protection. There’s no regular auditing process for how many of the devices are properly wiped, and thus no way to determine how many devices have been sold that accidentally contain voter records.
But the point that only a some of such devices were made open at DEF CON and one of them had records of individuals that were so easily accessible doesn’t inspire faith, said Matt Blaze, a famous security researcher who has authored numerous studies on voting machine protection and who helped build the community.
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