Key facts
- Hackers have repeatedly found vulnerabilities in voting machines and poll books at the DEFCON conference's Voting Village.
- Despite these flaws, experts state that the vulnerabilities are often not exploitable and do not indicate actual election breaches.
- The U.S. election system's decentralization makes it extremely difficult to scale any potential attack to change election results.
- Increased use of paper ballots or machines with paper trails has reduced the number of voters using purely electronic systems.
Experts argue that Donald Trump's rhetoric presents a greater danger to election integrity than the technical vulnerabilities found in voting machines. While hackers at the annual DEFCON conference's Voting Village have consistently identified flaws in voting equipment, including remote access and the presence of Chinese hardware, these vulnerabilities are often not exploitable. Harri Hursti, co-founder of the Voting Village, emphasized that the mere existence of vulnerabilities does not indicate that a system has been breached. He noted that such flaws are common across all systems but are not necessarily exploitable. The security measures implemented after Russian hacking efforts in 2016, such as the widespread adoption of paper ballots or electronic machines with paper trails, mean that only a small percentage of voters rely on purely electronic systems without a paper record. Furthermore, the highly decentralized nature of U.S. elections, with each state and county operating under its own laws and using different equipment, makes it virtually impossible to scale any successful attack on a single machine to alter the outcome of a national election.