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I don't know much about the election machines, but is there any reason for them to be connected to the WWW? If they're not connected to the WWW, then only someone with physical access to the machines could hack them...right? What's the likelihood of that?

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Most voting machines are connected to the Internet or to a machine that has been connected to the Internet in some point in the lifecycle of an election. But even absent hacking, there are sometimes configuration errors (e.g., swapping candidates or contests) that don't get detected in pre-election testing, procedural or equipment failures that result in not scanning some ballots or scanning some more than once, etc.

Presumably components of the hardware or software could be compromised somewhere upstream by nation-state actors like the CIA and NSA's TAO. It's not as if Iran's nuclear facilities were connected to the Internet and that didn't exactly keep their centrifuges safe.

Right...definitely possible, but this would have to be extremely well coordinated. Chances are each state/city has different machines/hardware/software, different order of candidates on the ballots, etc...so for a random hacker to hack the results would be only if the machines are connected to the internet...I'm hoping they're not!

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