Security Vulnerability in a Voting System
Security Vulnerability in a Voting System
It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.
Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary.
Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.
After pointing a coding agent to the original vulnerability paper, I supplied it with two data sources highlighted in the paper: the early-voting list for each county, and the “CVR” (cast-vote record) file, containing every ballot and its selections (but not the voters’ names or other identifying information). The CVR file is available upon request, precisely because a public, ballot-level record is what makes election results independently verifiable.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
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