Editorials: If coronavirus doesn’t end us, electronic voting just might | Robert Abele/Los Angeles Times
Though the November 2020 election has probably never felt farther away, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thinking about how we’re going to protect its integrity and ensure that this vital aspect of democracy runs smoothly. Then again, considering what we’ve learned about Russian interference in 2016 and beyond, and how routinely voting issues crop up every cycle, what if America is already behind the eight ball on that front as well? That’s the scary scenario rolled out over 90 minutes in the HBO documentary “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections” from filmmakers Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale, which says that electronic voting is still woefully unsafe from bad actors, be they nations or loners. Distraction viewing, this admittedly isn’t. The trio behind “Kill Chain” have tackled this story before, in the 2006 documentary “Hacking Democracy,” which centered on vulnerabilities in the Diebold e-voting machines that had risen to prominence in the 2000 and 2004 elections. In that film, Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti demonstrated how easy it was to get into a Diebold system to change votes. Diebold is no more — it was bought by another company, which was then subsumed by a bigger voting machine outfit — but Hursti is still around, his knowledge of election security problems even greater, so it’s not surprising that the filmmakers have made him their tour guide for the 2.0 version of their techno-cautious crusade. At the core of the movie’s warning is that an electronic voting machine is always penetrable — something most readily proved in a scene at the annual hacker convention Def Con, in which Hursti instructs assembled participants to try to sabotage the voting machines provided, which they then do. That the main companies behind these products are tight-lipped about their security, and breaches around the country are sometimes kept from the public, doesn’t inspire confidence.