A Attorney and computer programmer Clinton Eugene Curtis told the Arizona Senate Election Committee Monday that there are multiple ways voting machines can be hacked to change election results.
Curtis, a Democrat, began his presentation with a video clip of him testifying before Congress following the 2004 presidential election about how he believed that the election in Ohio was hacked.
In the video, Curtis explained that in 2000, at the request of a Florida politician, he created a program that "would flip the votes 51-49 to whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted to win." He added that elections officials wouldn't be able to detect such a program.
Testifying before the Arizona Senate, Curtis said that flipping votes is "very easy to do" but "hard to stop." The only way to stop it is by not using machines, he explained.
Don't use machines, because you can never, ever trust them to give you a fair election," Curtis warned. "There are too many ways to hack them. You can hack them at the level that I did when you first build them, you can hack them from the outside, you can hack them with programs that load themselves on the side. It's impossible to secure them.
"You will never beat the programmer. The programmer always owns the universe. And as long as you have machines — I don't care which company — as long as you have machines, they are vulnerable to this."
A losing candidate can win "not because he got more votes, but because twenty-four lines of code can change it, and there's nothing you can do," said Curtis. "You can't catch it. You can't find it. It can be a separate module, and it can erase itself right after it does it. And there's nothing you can do to stop it — nothing. It's impossible."
There isn't currently evidence proving that machines have flipped votes in the U.S.
Following Curtis' presentation, the Arizona Senate Election Committee approved an amendment to Senate Bill 1074 to require that electronic ballot tabulation machines have all parts "manufactured in the United States," according to the text of the amendment.
"The voting machine systems in Arizona contain components that are manufactured and assembled or tested in foreign nations such as China which pose a direct threat to the United States," Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli said Monday.
Borrelli said he considers it "a national security issue ... if we can have foreign actors being involved in the manufacturing or even manipulating the system."
Many microchips, which are used in voting equipment, are made in China and Taiwan.computer programmer testified this week to an Arizona Senate committee that voting machines are susceptible to manipulation as the panel seeks to require that voting machine components are made in the U.S. and that the source code for the machines used in the state is available to government officials.
