With the presidential election only a few weeks away, questions swirl about the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. Today’s voting systems run the gamut from punch cards to touchscreens. This November, three-quarters of U.S. voters will cast a paper ballot, but the other 25% are triggering concern. As electronic voting machines get older and less secure, the question becomes: just how safe is our vote? Over at Wired, Brian Barrett investigates the vulnerabilities of America’s electronic voting machines. Though he makes sure to emphasize there’s “no evidence of direct voting machine interference to date,” he concedes the research is grim. Susceptibility to malware and denial of service attacks has repeatedly been demonstrated. In some cases, compromising an electronic voting machine could be as easy as jumping onto an unsecured Wi-Fi network. Just last year Virginia decertified 3000 WINVote touchscreen voting machines when serious security problems were exposed, including “a poorly secured Wi-Fi feature for tallying votes.” At the time, Jeremy Epstein, a computer scientist with SRI International, noted, ““anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded,” including someone within a half-mile of a polling pace outfitted with “a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can.” Hacking the Vote Aging operating systems provide the biggest opportunity for would-be hackers. As Barrett explains, most electronic voting machines use some variation of Windows XP, which hasn’t received a security patch in over two years. Unfortunately, most of the voting computers are at least a decade old, and just not equipped to deal with a sophisticated attack. “People weren’t thinking about voting system security or all the additional challenges that come with electronic voting systems,” Brennan Center’s Lawrence Norden tells Wired. “Moving to electronic voting systems solved a lot of problems, but created a lot of...