FUD and Voting Machine Hacking: An Important Point and Important Lesson

This morning I am doing radio interviews as a Fox News Radio contributor. My topic? The DEFCON Voting Village demonstration of hacking voting machines that have been, or may currently be, used in US elections. Here are a couple of the news stories if you are unfamiliar: Hacking a US electronic voting booth takes less than 90 minutes | New Scientist and To Fix Voting Machines, Hackers Tear Them Apart | Wired

With all of the talk about hacking or rigging elections, this is a great topic to pique people’s interest for a radio interview but it can also generate a great deal of FUD. And, I really do not like FUD because it detracts from the real issues and lessons that we can learn from situations. So, there is one very important point and one very important lesson that I have tried to make during these interviews and that I hope will rise above the FUD:

IMPORTANT POINT: The voting machines used in this example were obtained from eBay and government auctions because they had been decommissioned. This means they were old. Unfortunately, some had been used in recent elections — which is a big problem — but generally speaking, we’re talking about outdated technology.

IMPORTANT LESSON: Voting machines are computers and, while (IMO) no computer will be secure they can certainly be more secure. We must be vigilant about the security of the voting machines and other election infrastructure that we use in our voting process and demand that current, state of the art equipment be used, where security is baked in from the outset and is continuously maintained as an ongoing process, from now on until further notice.