National: 2020 election security to face same vulnerabilities as in 2016 | Michael Heller/TechTarget
For the third year running, the Voting Village at DEF CON shined a light on election security and one thing was made clear: no one agrees on what to expect in 2020. In opening remarks at DEF CON, founders Harri Hursti, Matt Blaze and Jake Braun laid out the long road the Voting Village has traveled to raise awareness of election security issues. Blaze, who serves as the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, pointed out the troubles began with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which passed in 2002 as an effort to modernize and improve election administration. “They didn’t understand as much at the time as we do now about building voting machines and almost everything produced to comply with the Help America Vote Act has terrible vulnerabilities associated with it,” Blaze said. “That’s partly because we’ve taken these systems that weren’t dependent on software before and made them dependent on software. And, as everybody here in Las Vegas can tell you, software is utterly terrible. So we essentially took a problem that was hard and we added software to it.” A new initiative at this year’s Voting Village was to connect security researchers and hackers directly to election officials to provide pro bono work to help secure the 2020 election. Braun, an executive director for the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy’s Cyber Policy Initiative, noted the past work of the Voting Village had been corroborated. “The Mueller report reinforced a lot of what we identified last year, like you can hack a website with a SQL injection and get into a voter registration database, which is exactly what Mueller said the Russians did in 2016,” Braun said. “And frankly, they didn’t even go as far as we said was possible [in last year’s election.]”