These voting machines are disturbingly easy to hack

A new study on AVS WinVote voting machines, which have been used in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi, reveals that they "would get an F-minus" in security measures.

The machines in Virginia, which were used for more than a decade between 2002 and 2014, had passwords like "admin" and "abcde," which could not be changed to something more secure. To make matters worse, they used Windows XP as their operating system — despite the fact that it has not had a security update in more than a decade.

In fact, anyone with relatively minimal hacking skills could have modified every vote in any machine provided they were within half a mile of it and in possession of — wait for it — "a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can."

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Whether this hacking happened, however, is impossible to determine, because the machines do not keep logs of such interference. As one investigator commented, "Bottom line is that if no Virginia elections were ever hacked (and we have no way of knowing if it happened), it's because no one with even a modicum of skill tried."