Colorado Official: Rigged Election A 'Conspiracy Of Extraordinary Proportions'
DENVER (CBS4) - There are growing concerns over the possibility of a rigged presidential election as some experts believe hackers could compromise electronic voting machines.
"I'm afraid the election's going to be rigged, I have to be honest," Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said to his supporters.
Trump believes the 2016 presidential election is out of his control. Some hackers with Symantec Security Response said results could be manipulated using a $15 device sold online.
"I can insert it and then it resets the card, and now I'm able to vote again," Brian Varner, principle researcher with Symantec, told CBS News.
Symantec experts said votes cast in some specific types of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines are not encrypted and can be vulnerable to hacking. Yet Colorado Election Director Judd Choate said a rigged election is next to impossible in Colorado.
"It would be a conspiracy of extraordinary proportions," Choate said.
Choate said voting systems in Colorado are heavily regulated and tested before and after Election Day.
"The first thing we do is a system review prior to the election," Choate told CBS4's Kelly Werthmann. "Then we do a logic accuracy test which guarantees that the machine is reading the ballot as it should."
Staff at voting locations also do a reconciliation every day of an election, according to Choate.
"They reconcile how many people came in and were logged into the poll book and how many votes were cast in those machines," he said. "So they would know right away if they suddenly had an additional number of votes."
It is also important to note the DRE machines in question by Symantec are only used in one Colorado county -- Elbert County. Choate said it would be very unlikely that the small number of voters there would cause a major problem in the election, adding about 95 percent of Colorado voters use mail-in ballots.
"It seems very unlikely that that very small group of people who have access to those pieces of equipment would have any influence on the outcome of an election, if they tried to act in a fraudulent manner," Choate said.
Kelly Werthmann joined the CBS4 team in 2012 as the morning reporter, covering national stories like the Aurora Theater Shooting and devastating Colorado wildfires. She now anchors CBS4 Weekend Morning News and reports during the week. Connect with her on Facebook or Twitter @KellyCBS4.
