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Comment by ortusdux | Hacker News Reader

"The Arizona Republic reported in May that because Senate Republicans had given private companies and individuals unfettered and unmonitored access to voting machines, the county might need to expend significant funds and time to ensure the equipment would meet federal, state and local requirements for certifying and protecting election equipment. Hobbs, the Secretary of State, later informed the Board of Supervisors that election technology and security experts, including at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unanimously advised her that the machines should not be reused in future elections because no methods exist to adequately secure them.[49][50]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_president...

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>unanimously advised her that the machines should not be reused in future elections because no methods exist to adequately secure them.

Yes isn't that more of an indictment of the machines than anything? Shouldn't these machines simply be able to get a new image written to them and be good to go?

Again if part of the security model of the voting machines is "nobody except trusted people can touch them", then they shouldn't be in use.

Do you use your computer to do anything secure like log in to your bank? How about you give me 1 week with your computer out of your control along with any BIOS/UEFI passwords, then after I return it to you would you still trust it to log in to your bank? Would you think you could sufficiently vet all the software and hardware to ensure I had done nothing to the computer?

Now instead assume I am only given 10 minutes with your computer, and not even the computer it self, just a touch screen with no access to any of the physical ports, and I'm only allowed to use a very limited guest account that can only run one program that is auto run and the account logs out if that program closes. Would you feel safe using that computer afterwards?

> Shouldn't these machines simply be able to get a new image written to them and be good to go?

If you lose trust in the hardware there is next to nothing you can do in software to rectify the problem. The quote "no methods exist to adequately secure them" might be going to far, but it's entirely reasonable to say it would be cheaper to buy 5 new machines than it would be to fully verify and recertify 1 of the spoiled machines.

Given that most computers are already backdoored before you buy them and that they spend more than 1 week with the manufacturer I would say that this is an argument against electronic election machines.

I honestly never understood why anyone (except these who manufacture them) would support their use.

Could you show your homework? In particular, how many is "most", and which manufacturers and chip lines are affected?

You are not my teacher.

Never claimed to be. You claim to have an argument, and I want to know more details. Of course, if you don't have evidence to support your argument...

Try to be politer next time and you might just get what you seek.

Tone policing is boring. It sounds like you don't have evidence. Stop spreading anti-democratic propaganda; you sound like a cryptofascist.

I would trust it approximately as much as I trust voting machines which aren’t built on open source platforms.

> Shouldn’t these machines simply be able to get a new image written to them and be good to go?

If they can be trivially reimaged, that’s already a security problem.

They can go through the entire recertification process with any necessary rebuilding, but the cost of that when you have no certainty what might have been done is unlikely to be less than, and may be much more than (ad hoc diagnosis being much more expensive than production-line manufacturing) just buying a new certified machine.

So…do these machines seriously not go through a recertification process for every election?!

That seems catastrophically stupid.

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