Largest Voting Machine Vendor in US Admits Its Systems Had Remote-Access Software Installed
After denying that their voting systems came with remote-access software, the country’s largest voting machine vendor had just come clean.
By Matt Agorist
TheFreeThoughtProject.com
July 18, 2018
A bombshell revelation on the security of voting in the United States has just surfaced in the form of a letter from the country’s largest voting machine manufacturer. The company, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) admitted that despite denying previous allegations of its voting systems coming installed with remote-access software, their systems did, indeed, allow for remote connections.
In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), written in April, but only released this week, the company acknowledged that it had installed software that made the systems remotely accessible from anywhere.
“Prior to the inception of the [Election Assistance Commission] testing and certification program and the subsequent requirement for hardening and at customer’s request, ES&S provided pcAnywhere remote connection software on the [Election-Management System] workstation to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,” wrote Tom Burt, ES&S president.
According to Vice reporter, Kim Zetter, “The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold.”
“None of the employees, … including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software,” the spokesperson said in February. However, this proved to be untrue.
Wyden described the decision to install remote-access software as “the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.”
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