The DNC leak shows how vulnerable this election is to hacking

In 2006, Halderman was part of a three-person research team at Princeton University that published an influential study revealing the startling vulnerabilities of the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, which was, at the time, the most widely used voting machine in America.

“What we found was horrifying,” Halderman said. “We could really easily hack into it and change the vote to whatever we wanted.” Halderman and his colleagues also designed malicious code that could spread from machine to machine, a virus outfitted with the power to manipulate the election results of a whole county or an entire state. Several states still use the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine in certain counties and jurisdictions.

“That’s a very realistic threat, that attackers might try to target electronic voting machines in order to influence politics,” Halderman said. “Ten years ago it might have sounded like science fiction, but it’s just the world we live in today — [with] things like the DNC hack, the North Korea hack on Sony, or all of the espionage related to China. It’s quite realistic.”

Perhaps more distressing than the vulnerabilities the Princeton team discovered is that many voting precincts have yet to address the security concerns first revealed a decade ago. “The guidelines under which almost all machines in use today were purchased had no effective security standards in place,” Halderman said. “It boggles the mind.”