Top Stories in October: 'Next Generation' Voting Machines Have Alarming Vulnerabilities

In an op-ed written by Brian Varner, a special projects researcher for Symantec, he explains how in 2016, he bought two voting machines on eBay for $100. "The information I found on the drives, including candidates, precincts, and the number of votes cast on the machine, were not encrypted," he wrote. As the US approaches the midterm elections, the ease with which a researcher could tamper with voting machines should be alarming. We'll let him tell it: "To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines—those that were used in the 2016 election—are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones."