National: State officials warn Congress: don’t damage public confidence in election systems | SC Magazine
An association of state officials has published an open letter that seeks to strengthen public confidence in the electoral process, in light of research that has raised questions about the security of voting machines. The National Association of Secretaries of State’s (NASS) letter calls on Congress to avoid using political rhetoric or proposing legislation that may damage confidence in the election systems. State officials are “working overtime to help the public understand the components of our election process and some of the built-in safeguards that exist,” the letter stated. “Voting systems are spread out in a highly-decentralized structure covering more than 9,000 election jurisdictions and hundreds of thousands of polling locations.” Despite NASS’s argument that the decentralized structure of election systems creates added security, a series of reports on voting machine infrastructure suggests another view. In an email to SCMagazine.com, James Scott, senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), noted that the lack of a centralized system creates added risks. “The lack of a National system just means that some states manage secure election systems while others lack the resources or expertise to do so,” he wrote. “An attacker only needs to compromise the results of one or two pivotal states in order to alter the results of the election.”