Editorials: Protect Our Voting Machines From Hackers | Lawrence Norden/NBC News
In the last two weeks, there have been credible reports that Russia is attempting to influence our elections by hacking into the Democratic Party’s email server and other campaign files. These reports are troubling. But an attack on our country’s voting machines, once deemed far-fetched, is even more disturbing. In response, the Obama administration is considering designating America’s electronic voting system as “critical infrastructure,” which would likely bring more federal resources to protecting these systems from attack. But with just three months before the presidential election, what can be done? In truth, making big changes to election machinery before this November isn’t realistic. There isn’t enough time. Fortunately, security experts and activists have worked for several years to shore up election integrity, and there is much we can do to secure the technology currently in place. In the short term, election jurisdictions must review their security measures with experts in the next three months. One of the great victories of security specialists and advocates in the last few years was convincing jurisdictions to move from paperless computerized voting machines to machines that have some kind of voter verified paper trail. This November, 80 percent of citizens will vote on paper ballots that are read by electronic scanners, or touch screen machines that produce a paper trail that can be reviewed by the voter before she casts her vote. This should deter would-be hackers looking to alter the result of an election: the paper record can be used to check the totals provided by the machine and catch incorrect results.