BROADCASTS.com

On today's 'BradCast':\xa0 Elections officials seem to be panicking around the country, and for good reason \u2013 although their concerns come about a decade or so too late, now that virtually every aspect of our "public" elections in the U.S.\xa0 has largely taken over by private vendors and contractors, with little or no oversight. A new AP analysis has discovered that nearly all voting systems currently in use in all 50 states are run on Windows 7 software (or earlier) that Microsoft will no longer update with regular security patches beginning in January. That includes new systems certified by the federal Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) as recently as this year. Financially strapped and technologically-challenged elections officials at both the state and local level are being asked to shoulder the burden of national security with little help from the federal government \u2013 but it's not just nation-states like Russia that pose a threat to the security of America's vulnerable, computerized and privatized elections, but also regular American hackers, like the recent hack of customer data at Capitol One.\xa0 Researchers and hackers at last weekend's Def Con Voting Village conference in Las Vegas also discovered numerous vulnerabilities in brand new voting and registration systems. Cybersecurity journalist KIM ZETTER explains her new, jaw-dropping exclusive detailing how -- contrary to the protestations of U.S. election officials and voting machine vendors that critical election systems are never connected to the internet and therefore can't be hacked -- a group of election security researchers have discovered that back-end election systems in 10 states were connected to the internet over the last year, including in critical swing states. And in many cases, the elections officials seemed to have no idea that their systems had been connected to the Internet by their vendors....