Hackers found vulnerabilities in voting machines — but it’s too late to do anything about it

A group of hackers at a Las Vegas conference identified scores of vulnerabilities in voting equipment, but it’s unlikely fixes will make it to polling places before Election Day in November.

“There’s so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening, so yes I’m worried about things not being fixed, but they haven’t been fixed for a long time, and I’m also angry about it,” Harri Hursti, co-founder of the DEF Con conference’s Voting Village program, told Politico .

“If you don’t think this kind of place is running 24/7 in China, Russia, you’re kidding yourselves,” he added. “We are here only for two and a half days, and we find stuff…it would be stupid to assume that the adversaries don’t have absolute access to everything.”

The Voting Village programmers found pages of vulnerabilities, and are expected to release a full report of their findings in the coming weeks.

The organizers said the amount of vulnerabilities found was consistent with other years. Voting firms are typically able to patch problems that are identified, but the process can take longer than the 83 days remaining until the election.

Still, the potential weak spots could prove especially problematic in 2024.

Last week, internal communications from the Trump campaign were shared with media outlets as the result of a hack, potentially from Iranian agents.

“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our democratic process,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said of the incident.

What’s more, Donald Trump has been baselessly challenging the validity of the 2020 election since it happened, and numerous top Republicans have signaled in recent months they might not accept the results in 2024.

The atmosphere around elections has only gotten more polarized since 2020, even though the evidence never bore out Trump’s claims of massive irregularities that threw the election to Biden.

None of the 64 lawsuits from the Trump campaign and its allies filed challenging the 2020 election had any merit or resulted in findings that would change the election result, and Trump administration officials like then-Attorney General Bill Barr have called claims of voter fraud “b******t.”