You are making the totally erroneous assumption that TPTB want increased voter participation. The Republicans absolutely do not. They would love it if the only folks who could vote were wealthy retired folks. Anything that allows working class and other groups to vote in greater numbers is totally against their interests.
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“Kentucky left its password-free service running and said ProPublica didn’t understand its approach to security.”
I guess that statement is technically true. I don’t understand it either.
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I’m wary of saying things like this for accusations of paranoia.
But looking at just how spectacularly badly designed the US voting machines are (even ignoring the huge issue of electronic voting machines being a terrible idea to start with), it just boggles the mind how bad they are.
This epic level of security clusterfuck (not just this machine but all previous ones too) surely cannot be written off as mere ineptitude, i’m favouring the ‘this is deliberate’ camp 
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Well I guess in Wisconsin or Kentucky you can just vote by FTP now. What a country!
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Vulnerable e-voting machines have been an issue for decades now. Why is this surprising.
No shit. That’s why it’s an imperative.
Gawdammit! Paper (optically scanned) ballots! It’s cheap for the elections management folks and prohibitively expensive for the hackers (per unit). There’s a built in possibility for a proper recount (if necessary by gasp human eyeball) and there’s individual QRcode tracking. If you ignore this in favor of having your voter punch at what is essentially a laptop screen to vote then your election will be hacked - not maybe - not “we’ll fix it up in version13.666”, it will be hacked now. paper! [old nerd shakes head in hands]
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Which reminds me.
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We use this:
I live in Washington and it’s all vote by mail - you get your state and local booklets and paper ballot in the mail. You simply fill it out, sign the envelope, and drop it in the mailbox or at a drop location. As of this election cycle the ballot mailer is even postage paid. There’s basically no excuse to not vote.
If only more states made it this easy.
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Saturday voting in Oz. And trivially easy postal voting if you’re still busy.
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Don’t all states do that or the equivalent? Some even make people register in advance and turn them away if they’re not pre-registered or don’t have ID. I don’t agree with that practice, but it’s common knowledge so someone smart enough to hack into the election system probably already knows that or would find out elsewhere.
An open FTP port is little more concerning than non-SSL HTTP. It is possible to run a decently secure FTP server as long as the files being served are meant to be public anyway, and uploading is disabled. Jail the service for improved protection.
I’d be much more concerned about which ones are running Windows. Using Microsoft for public servers usually indicates poor competence and lack of thought all around. I’ll bet these are running Windows.
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