slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Daniel Howley,Technology Editor

Yahoo Finance, November 6, 2016

Ever since hackers broke into the Democratic National Committee’s email server, the specter of a foreign government controlling the e******n has become a near panic-inducing fear for some v**ers — especially if you follow social media chatter.

After all, if hackers could break into the DNC and steal emails about staffers’ pizza orders, what’s to stop them from changing the entire outcome of the 2016 e******n? A lot actually — including government officials regularly checking v****g machines for suspicious activity.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for some concern. A good number of machines out there are still vulnerable to attack. And some are so laughably easy to hack, or just so plain faulty, that the vast majority of states have completely done away with them. Still, about 25% of v**ers will have to use those older machines.

It’s unlikely anything will happen during the national e******n, but it’s worth understanding the risks and how we got here.

Our current v****g predicament goes back to the 2000 e******n pitting George W. Bush against Al Gore. At that time, Florida v**ers cast their b****ts using punch cards. Some of those cards weren’t punched properly, causing counting errors. A number of lawsuits over the e******n were filed, and eventually the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush.

To stop similar issues from arising in the future, Congress passed the Help America V**e Act (HAVA) to provide states with money to buy new all-electronic v****g machines. But it didn’t exactly go according to plan.

That’s because security researchers found those new computerized machines to be incredibly vulnerable to hackers. What’s more, the machines didn’t have paper backups that could be checked in the event of a hack or software malfunction.

Since then, many states have retired their all-electronic machines. As a result, about 75% to 80% of the US uses newer systems that use both electronic v****g with paper backups or regular paper b****ts. But five states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina — currently rely on the old all-electronic systems. Others including Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Texas use a mixture of old electronic-only machines and newer mixed and paper-based systems.

Even though so many Americans still use outdated machines, the chances of hackers stealing the e******n are incredibly small. That’s because v****g machines use what are called “air gaps,” which means they never connect to the internet. So hackers can’t break into these systems they same way they can crack into your uncle’s laptop.

That doesn’t mean their impenetrable, though. According to Jeremy Epstein, a computer scientists with SRI International, a person dedicated to disrupting the e******n could break into a machine and infect it by loading it with a v***s through a USB stick.

When the e******ns officials take that machine’s storage device out and plug it into the server that does all of the v**e counting, the server will become infected with the v***s. From there, the v***s will spread to every other storage device that’s plugged into the server. Reinstall those drives into their machines again, and the entire v****g system will be infected. Hackers could cast their own v**es, change existing v**es or delete certain b****ts entirely — thereby throwing the outcome of the entire e******n into question.

GodFollower

But even the "air gap" with paper trail b****ts, does nothing to stop defrauding the v**ers by b****t stuffing OR people v****g multiple times under assumed names. This is one of the ways that Hilary is c***ting to "win" this e******n. Her biggest c***t is the threat of death combined with blackmail and the promise of more power to those who follow her lead. Screaming, scheming Hillary must not be elected POTUS by ANY means. The Speaker of the House should act as Interim President until we can have an HONEST e******n - if that is even possible!

SinnieK

I wouldn't worry about hackers because George Soros has the complete control of the electronic v****g machine inside out. So a v**e for Trump can become Hillary's anytime Soros wants. So the American people who want to control their own life instead of the g*******ts control them should be more worried with the crooked Soros' v****g machine.