But while electronic voting machines have not been exploited at scale, they do have vulnerabilities that researchers have pressed manufacturers and election officials alike to patch for more than 10 years.
Many of these vulnerabilities have been discovered during the annual Voting Village gathering at the DEFCON conference in Las Vegas, where hackers are able to physically rip apart some of the more common types of voting machines and poll books used across the country. Each time, they’ve found vulnerabilities.
At the 2017 event, each piece of equipment in the room was breached by participants within three days, including one electronic voting system that was hacked and remotely taken control of in minutes. Several machines were found to have Chinese hardware, raising concerns about supply chain vulnerabilities. In 2018, a voting tabulator used in 23 states at the time was remotely hacked. And the 2020 NIC report released by the White House referenced the modification of a poll book at the 2019 Voting Village to run the video game Doom.
Harri Hursti, co-founder of the Voting Village, stressed Friday that the mere presence of vulnerabilities in the equipment — often found by hackers physically accessing them — does not mean any sort of widespread compromise has ever taken place.
“Every system on the planet is almost guaranteed to have some vulnerabilities — but that doesn’t mean that the vulnerabilities are exploitable,” Hursti said Friday. “All vulnerabilities should be fixed, and prioritizing exploitable ones first — but just the presence of vulnerabilities is not in any shape or form an indication that the system has been breached.”
The Russian hacking efforts in 2016 actually contributed to making it even harder for hackers to make a dent in U.S. election outcomes. It spurred election officials across the country to move towards either using paper ballots or electronic machines with paper trails. As a result, only around 4 percent of registered voters currently live in regions where only direct recording electronic systems are used for voting, ensuring that there is a paper trail documenting how the vast majority of Americans voted.