https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/10/23/Voting-machine-company-has-ties-to-Romney/38451351036348/
Voting machine company has ties to Romney
Oct. 23, 2012 / 7:52 PM
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The company whose voting machines will be tabulating votes in the swing states of Ohio and Colorado has links to Mitt Romney, a company spokesman said.
Salon magazine reported Tuesday Hart Intercivic's ties to the Republican presidential nominee first popped up last month on the Ohio website Free Press, which reported a key investor in Hart was HIG Capital.
Seven HIG Capital directors are former employees of Bain & Co., where Romney was chief executive officer before leaving in 1984 to found Bain Capital. HIG Capital, which has contributed $338,000 to the Romney campaign this year, announced its investment in Hart a month after Romney formally entered the presidential race, Salon said.
The Nation reported HIG Capital has ties to the Romney family through private equity firm Solamere, which has invested in HIG and is run by Romney's son, Tagg.
Hart Intercivic spokesman Peter Lichtenheld told Salon while HIG is a major investor, "it has nothing to do with management at Hart."
"We don't want the perception that we have some political agenda," Lichtenheld said. "We are in the election business and integrity is paramount."
Salon also noted a 2007 study commissioned by the state of Ohio found Hart Intercivic's voting system does a poor job when it comes to protecting the integrity of elections. The study found the Hart system allowed unauthorized individuals to gain access to memory cards and "easily tamper" with core voting data.
"The vulnerabilities and features of the system work in concert to provide 'numerous opportunities to manipulate election outcomes or cast doubt on legitimate election activities ... virtually every ballot, vote, election result and audit log is forge-able or otherwise manipulatable by an attacker with even brief access to the voting systems,'" the study concluded.
Lichtenheld said Hart's system has not been upgraded to address the concerns. He downplayed the concerns, saying the evaluators "were given unfettered access" so "they had all the time in the world and didn't have to worry about security breaches."
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I don't know what the status is as of 2020, however, Kentucky is rigged with Hart Intercivic machines. Not sure about where else.
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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/online-vulnerable-experts-find-nearly-three-dozen-u-s-voting-n1112436
Online and vulnerable': Experts find nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to internet
A team of election security experts used a “Google for servers” to challenge claims that voting machines do not connect to the internet and found some did.
New warnings of hacking risks for voting systems connected to the internet
Jan. 10, 2020, 3:36 PM PST
By Kevin Monahan, Cynthia McFadden and Didi Martinez
It was an assurance designed to bolster public confidence in the way America votes: Voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”
Then Acting Undersecretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security Jeanette Manfra said those words in 2017, testifying before Congress while she was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system.
So many government officials like Manfra have said the same thing over the last few years that it is commonly accepted as gospel by most Americans. Behind it is the notion that if voting systems are not online, hackers will have a harder time compromising them.
But that is an overstatement, according to a team of 10 independent cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections. While the voting machines themselves are not designed to be online, the larger voting systems in many states end up there, putting the voting process at risk.
That team of election security experts say that last summer, they discovered some systems are, in fact, online.
“We found over 35 [voting systems] had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical advisor at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News.
Image: Kevin Skoglund
Kevin Skoglund, senior technical advisor at the National Election Defense Coalition.NBC News
“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” he said. “And we knew that wasn't true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to to report their results.”
Skoglund and his team developed a tool that scoured the internet to see if the central computers that program voting machines and run the entire election process at the precinct level were online. Once they had identified such systems, they contacted the relevant election officials and also provided the information to reporter Kim Zetter, who published the findings in Vice’s Motherboard in August.
The three largest voting manufacturing companies — Election Systems &Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic — have acknowledged they all put modems in some of their tabulators and scanners. The reason? So that unofficial election results can more quickly be relayed to the public. Those modems connect to cell phone networks, which, in turn, are connected to the internet.
The largest manufacturer of voting machines, ES&S, told NBC News their systems are protected by firewalls and are not on the “public internet.” But both Skoglund and Andrew Appel, a Princeton computer science professor and expert on elections, said such firewalls can and have been breached.
SNIP
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