For the last two years, hackers have come to the Voting Village at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas to tear down voting machines and analyze them for vulnerabilities.
You know it better as Darpa, the government's mad science wing.
And Darpa wants you to know: its endgame goes way beyond securing the vote.
The agency hopes to use voting machines as a model system for developing a secure hardware platform—meaning that the group is designing all the chips that go into a computer from the ground up, and isn’t using proprietary components from companies like Intel or AMD.
“The goal of the program is to develop these tools to provide security against hardware vulnerabilities,” says Linton Salmon, the project’s program manager at Darpa.
To vote using the system, you go up to a touchscreen, make your picks (Which Is The Best Star Wars Movie; Are Hot Dogs Sandwiches), confirm your selections, and then send them to print out.
Implementing blockchain in voting helps to optimize the voting process with more security, transparency, integrity and prevents voter frauds, duplicate voter entries.
For two years in a row, hackers at Defcon have demonstrated that voting machines currently being used in US elections had serious security issues.
Now with the 2020 US presidential election quickly approaching, lawmakers who want to fix those vulnerabilities are heading to the hacking conference in Las Vegas to see them in person.
While there's no evidence that any votes were tampered with during the 2016 election, hackers have shown plenty of proof that the voting machines being used are vulnerable to attacks.
Lawmakers like Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, have proposed legislation to improve election security to make sure these vulnerabilities wouldn't affect future voters.
"White hat hackers do an invaluable public service in this technologic age by identifying security holes and, if necessary, shaming the government or the companies responsible into fixing them," Wyden said in a statement.
This comes after former special counsel Robert Mueller warned Congress last month that Russia would continue its efforts to hack US elections, telling lawmakers, "They're doing it as we sit here."
Brian Kemp drew protests Thursday as he signed into law a sweeping Republican-sponsored overhaul of state elections that includes new restrictions on voting by mail and greater legislative control over how elections are run.
