Dominion voting machines have the potential to be breached, according to an advisory from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
These, of course, are the machines that caused controversy in the 2020 election.
The Dominion machines are now shown to have nine vulnerabilities, according to the Friday advisory.
So far nothing bad has happened. The advisory said, “While these vulnerabilities present risks that should be mitigated as soon as possible, CISA has no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections.”
Indeed, CISA has called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Hacking the machines would require both physical access to devices and the election management system, or the ability to alter files before being uploaded to the machines, CISA said.
The descriptions of the nine vulnerabilities are fairly technical and include recommendations for election officials to mitigate them.
In the meantime, at least 16 states have these potentially vulnerable machines, according to The Associated Press.
While CISA brushed aside the ghosts of elections past, it’s concerned about Dominion’s weaknesses in the future.
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“Jurisdictions can prevent and/or detect the exploitation of these vulnerabilities by diligently applying the mitigations recommended in this advisory, including technical, physical, and operational controls that limit unauthorized access or manipulation of voting systems,” the advisory said.
“Many of these mitigations are already typically standard practice in jurisdictions where these devices are in use and can be enhanced to further guard against exploitation of these vulnerabilities.”
And don’t forget that with the midterm elections coming, fixing the problems become critical.
The CISA advisory is based on a report by computer scientist J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan. He has previously argued for multiple safeguards to be put in place for voting machines and has said that hand-marked paper ballots are the most secure way to vote, according to the AP.
Hartman noted that while it’s difficult to carry out a hacking, it can happen.
“They are things that we should worry could be exploited by sophisticated attackers, such as hostile nation states, or by election insiders, and they would carry very serious consequences,” he told the AP.
Voters continually lament being unable to personally put their mark on a paper ballot.
Because — while it’s not perfect — there’s a sense of honesty when writing on a ballot, and there’s no machine in between.
