> Consider the U.S. presidential election: The outcome is worth billions each to very many parties worldwide; it's existential to some foreign governments and actors; many in the U.S. have very powerful ideological motives. How much would it cost to hack voting machines? It seems very likely to me that it's happening, though I don't know where or to what extent.

It is largely a question of Cost adjusted by Risk v. Reward.

Running attack ads, social media sockpuppet operations, etc. are legal, effective, and have similar costs. Similarly, you have a nation-wide machine who you endanger when you fuck with the integrity of that machine [i.e. being caught doing anything illegal] already. You've got plenty of options to spend your money on, from the preceding election(s) to seize local and state voting mechanisms to run the game in those states [legally] with tactics that are clearly unethical and immoral [voter suppression, deploying outright lies/euphemisms in the name of controlling the voting population].

These mechanisms are much, much more powerful than "hacking" voting machines due their lack of risk, similar costs, and provide you with a foundation with which to influence future elections. Kansas shifted the vote [~2%] greater than Obama's margin of victory in Florida [.88%] with a single law.

Consider the current situation nationally:

http://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/why-attack-ads-wo...

> Although no one jumped from “definitely Bush” to “definitely Kerry,” some students who were leaning toward one candidate did switch to the other side. And in a tightly contested race, like this year’s presidential election, getting even a few people to change their vote can make all the difference in the world.

> They then showed the students one of four political ads and asked them to re-rate their levels of support. Roughly 14 percent of the students said the attack on their candidate made them support him even more, the researchers found. But an equal percentage of students said the advertisement weakened their support and caused them to move closer to the opponent—the one who ran the negative ad.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-democrats-suppress-t...

> In the ongoing fight between Democrats and Republicans over election procedures like voter ID and early voting, the Democrats are supposedly the champions of higher turnout and reducing barriers to participation. But when it comes to scheduling off-cycle elections1 like those taking place today, the Democratic Party is the champion of voter suppression.
> Scheduling local elections at odd times appears to be a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping turnout low, which gives more influence to groups like teachers unions that have a direct stake in the election’s outcome.

http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/24/voter-discrimination/

> Governor Chris Christie: Same-Day Voter Registration Is a “Trick” and GOP Needs to Win Gubernatorial Races So They Control “Voting Mechanisms”
> Fran Millar: Georgia Senator Complains About Polling Place Being Too Convenient for Black Voters
> Doug Preis: An Ohio GOP Chair Says We Shouldn’t Accommodate the “Urban — Read African-American — Voter-Turnout Machine”
> Greg Abbott: Texas AG Says Partisan Districting Decisions Are Legal, Even if There Are “Incidental Effects” on Minority Voters
> Don Yelton: North Carolina GOP Precinct Chair: Voter ID Law Will “Kick Democrats in the Butt” and Hurt “Lazy Blacks”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-vo...

> In the state’s nail-biting gubernatorial race, Republican incumbent Sam Brownback bested his Democratic challenger, Paul Davis, by a mere 33,000 votes out of nearly 850,000 cast. Now, compare that with the estimated effects of Kansas’s new restrictions on voting.

> We know that more than 21,000 people tried to register but failed because they lacked the necessary “documentary proof of citizenship” required by a new Kansas law. The state’s separate, strict voter ID law also had an effect: Applying findings from a recent Government Accountability Office report that examined how the voter ID law affected the state’s turnout in 2012, Weiser estimates that it probably reduced turnout this time around by about 17,000 votes.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/02/02/3745296/major-vo...

> For example, the researchers found that in primary elections, “a strict ID law could be expected to depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points.”

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> 1) Hacking voting machines to a significant extent would require a team of people, not just one guy, which dramatically increases the risk of exposure.

I don't agree with Burkman on that. It'd be relatively easy to hack them with a couple guys in a swing state who drops devices at target locations. You can get a partnership with decent security to function in this regard.

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/04/16/399986...

> When state auditors investigated, though, they didn't find that particular problem. Instead, they found something more disturbing. While using their smartphones, they were able to connect to the voting machines' wireless network, which is used to tally votes.
> Other state investigators easily guessed the system's passwords — in one case, it was "abcde" — and were then able to change the vote counts remotely without detection.

> 2) The reported vote count is usually very close to the predicted vote count, and always very close to exit polling results. The hacked results would need to be very close to the real results, or be combined with control over a huge number of people in the polling industry.

This is a larger problem that can only be surmounted in 1-2 swing states in a given election. You can't push the needle more than a few basis points with these tricks or you'll get all sorts of accusations flying, recounts, Bush v. Gore, etc. etc.

Weird statistical outliers simply don't happen often enough at the precinct/county level and the shift in state results are the results of an aggregation of events in multiple precincts. So I highly suspect you could flip one or two precincts this way as well as shift the whole state a few basis points on top of that but if you swing more than 1-1.5% this way I'm pretty sure you'll fail due to recounts and other safeguards.

The target states for this would be the usual "swing states":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... [ .88% ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele... [ 2.98% ]

You aren't going to be able to pull this off in Ohio but you could in Florida. You'd also need to be able to predict which states you could swing this way and do so without triggering a recount.

So you push Florida to +.62% Romney and sabotage things when your opponent demands a recount. The risk of detection is really, really high. If detected swinging this one state, you lose the election due to being on trial for criminal conspiray, etc. etc.