Hacking the US elections? Easy as pie, says Princeton prof

Can you hack the US election? Yes, says Professor Andrew Appel of the prestigious computer science wing at Princeton University.  In at least 9 states the answer is yes and you don’t have to be from Russia to do that. All it takes is an intense geek-out. Nine states in the US use touch screen voting machines which don’t have any paper trail. Once you’ve pushed some buttons and it beeps or lights up and you’re out the door, how do you know that you’ve voted Clinton and that machine has not understood it as Trump? These touch screen voting machines riddled with bugs and security holes will be in full force in Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Delaware, Kentucky. The low level game of election fraud is to just rig the machine to behave badly, the high stakes game end is to create cheating programs that shift votes around and are taught not to cheat while they are being tested. 44 million registered voters, accounting for 25 percent of the total US voters, live in jurisdictions that rely on paperless systems, including millions in contested states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. That means one in four registered voters in America live in areas that will use electronic voting machines that don’t produce a paper backup.