(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Last weekend, hackers at the annual Las Vegas DEF CON conference identified vulnerabilities in voting machines for the 2024 election that they couldn’t address before Nov. 5, 2024.
Politico reported that the DEF CON “Voting Village” event involved hackers working with various voting machines, attempting to bypass firewalls and other security measures on devices meant for counting ballots and confirming voters’ identities.
The news source added that many individuals focused on election integrity are concerned that no system exists to swiftly update security measures.
“As far as time goes, it is hard to make any real, major, systemic changes, but especially 90 days out from the election,” Catherine Terranova, one of the Voting Village organizers, said.
The news source reported that the organizers will publish an imminent report on the hacker’s findings. Harri Hursti, co-founder of the Voting Village, said the detected vulnerabilities took up “multiple pages” by Aug. 10, 2024. However, addressing bugs in the system would likely not be over by the time the election begins.
The news came after Donald Trump’s campaign was hacked, with the campaign referencing a Microsoft report that claimed Iranian hackers targeted a “high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.”
“On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the U.S. presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a vice presidential nominee,” campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said.
During the 2016 election, the FBI reported that foreign hackers breached two states’ election databases. The FBI did not clarify which states, but some news outlets reported that these states could’ve been Illinois and Arizona.
Republicans’ trust in U.S. elections nosedived after the 2020 election due to concerns about voter fraud. In 2022, Rasmussen Reports said that “most Republicans don’t trust electronic voting machines.”
The poll also found that “39% of likely U.S. voters believe voting machines make it easier to cheat in elections.”
