Hacked voting machine donated to Henry Ford museum

On Monday, August 26, The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, an internationally recognized destination with more than 1.7 millions visitors annually, took possession of a new artifact for its collection. The item in question was a Diebold AccuVote TSX paperless touch-screen voting machine, and the donor was Bredt Family Professor of Engineering J. Alex Halderman.

Halderman, well known for his work in the area of computer security and privacy, has made sizable contributions to the security of broadly used systems. He has helped to secure hundreds of millions of websites through the launch of the internet’s largest certificate authority, has developed a tool that can rapidly scan the entire internet to identify outages or vulnerabilities, has exposed flaws in the encryption algorithms used for everyday communications, and has developed technology for routing around internet censorship. 

But he is perhaps best known for his work in election cybersecurity – an area in which he has spent nearly 20 years making the technology behind American voting systems more secure, largely by uncovering and helping to patch vulnerabilities in equipment like voting machines and ballot scanners, and by advocating for best practices and technological advances.

The machine Halderman donated is one of five that he purchased on eBay in 2014, and which he has used for both security research and for public demonstrations. The AccuVote TSX was once the most common electronic voting machine in the country, and as recently as 2018 they were still used in parts of 18 states, including the swing states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Today, the machines have been almost entirely phased out, following two decades of criticism of paperless voting by security experts. Halderman used this particular machine to vividly demonstrate the risks. He showed how an attacker could remotely plant malicious code that would invisibly change every record of the votes, potentially altering the outcome of an election.

In 2017, Halderman testified in front of the Senate Select Committee on  Intelligence regarding vulnerabilities in US election infrastructure and a policy agenda for securing elections against the threat of hacking. The next year, he was invited to visit the Capitol and demonstrate how a hacker could change votes. That meeting, hosted by then-Senator Kamala Harris and Republican Senator James Lankford, allowed Halderman to engage a small group of senators in a mock election. 

In her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold, Harris wrote: “The professor simulated a vote for president, where we were given a choice between George Washington and the infamous Revolutionary War traitor, Benedict Arnold. As you might imagine, all four of us voted for George Washington. But when the result came back, Benedict Arnold had prevailed. The professor had used malicious code to hack the software of the voting machine in a way that assured Arnold’s victory, no matter how the four of us had voted.”

In December 2017, Harris, Lankford, and other senators introduced the Secure Elections Act, a bill designed to help protect the United States from foreign interference in our elections. Despite bipartisan support, the bill did not receive a vote in the Senate, but Congress did provide more than $386 million in grants to states to help replace paperless machines and make other election security improvements.

“A decade ago, nearly a third of America voted on vulnerable paperless machines,” said Halderman. “Today, it’s less than 5%. While we still have a long way to go to ensure that all election systems are well defended, this shows how much this country can accomplish when policymakers treat securing elections as a national priority.”

Kristen Gallerneaux, Curator of Communication & Information Technology and Editor-in-Chief of Digital Curation at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, met with Prof. Halderman to transport the voting machine to its new home at the museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

“The Henry Ford is honored and excited to serve as the home for this important record of historical voting technology,” said Gallerneaux. “This device serves as a physical document of voting machines in the 21st century, and is also associated with the fearless research and innovation of Prof. Halderman, who has worked to expose the pitfalls of electronic voting.” 

The donated machine will join a lineage of voting technology in the permanent collections of The Henry Ford, ranging from Thomas Edison’s 1869 patent model for the electrographic vote recorder to a mid-1990s IBM Votomatic butterfly ballot booth.