Hacking Internet Voting via Ballot Tampering

Election Day was this week. If you took advantage of early voting, or you live overseas, you probably used a paper ballot you received in the mail a few weeks ago. A digital alternative, being considered across the USA, is voting-by-email.

In this video, we summarize the dangers associated with voting over e-mail with PDF forms. We have demonstrated that an off-the-shelf home router can easily be modified to silently alter election ballots.

Several states, including Alaska and Maryland are now allowing voting over the internet, sometimes with PDF forms. With Alaska's governor race so tight, a hack like this could make the difference, even though it looks like only a few thousand votes were submitted electronically.

[reeeeeeeeemmmmmmmmmm]

So the only thing you've done is validated that things like end-to-end encryption and digital signatures have a reason for existing. Bravo! I sincerely hope using unsigned PDFs over plain-text channels, such as are assumed in this video, aren't even considered to be used for voting? I feel like this video is purposefully biasing people against digital voting by omitting the fact that methods and systems to prevent exactly this kind of tampering have already existed for a long time and are in use for countless other applications where privacy and authentication matter. There are other complications with digital voting such as guaranteeing anonymity while preventing individuals from voting multiple times, but this hack is based on a retarded way of digital voting. Who even sends e-mails with funny cat pictures to their uncle over unsecured SMTP anymore?