America's mass network of aging voting machines could jeopardize next year's presidential election, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
Forty-three states are using touchscreen and optical-scan voting systems that are at least 10 years old, and 13 states have machines over 15 years old.
The biggest risk is that machines break down far too often, and because most manufacturers have gone out of business, spare parts are hard to find, leading to long lines at the polls and lost votes. As many as 750,000 voters left their polling place in 2012 due to lines, according to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
On some of the machines, the glue that holds the screen down has come unstuck and caused the machine to register the wrong vote. Others contain memory cards that only hold 250 megabytes of data and are prone to fail.
"No one expects a laptop to last for 10 years. How can we expect these machines, many of which were designed and engineered in the 1990s, to keep running without increased failures?" Lawrence Norden, co-author of the study, said in a statement, reported the Sun-Times.
Laptop computers have an average lifespan of three to five years, and most computer users upgrade their operating systems every other year, according to Wired. But many voting machines run an embedded version of Windows XP, or even Windows 2000, which Microsoft no longer updates, so if a security hole is found, the vulnerability cannot be patched in the voting machine.
Hacking these vulnerabilities has been a worry for years. In 2011, a group of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Agonne National Laboratory hacked a Diebold voting machine with $26 in parts and the technical expertise obtained from an eighth-grade science class, reported Computer World.
Officials in 22 states acknowledged that they need to buy new equipment but said they don't have the money to do so, as they already used most of the Help American Vote Act funds allocated to them in 2002 to purchase the outdated machines they currently use.
Brennan Center researchers estimated that the initial cost for replacing voting machines could exceed $1 billion, but they said it's probably too late to upgrade before the 2016 presidential elections. They said election officials can still work to reduce mishaps through proper storage, preventative maintenance, pre- and post-election testing of machines and by having contingency plans in place in case something goes wrong on election day.
