National: Why getting election security right for 2020 matters | J.M. Porup/CSO Online
How much election security is enough? The answer: Enough to convince a losing candidate that they lost. Will that happen for the 2020 elections? Probably not. “Is it enough? How much is enough?” Herb Lin, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and co-author of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center’s “Securing American Elections” report, asks. “Unfortunately it’s not a technical answer. Enough means you’ve done enough so that you can persuade the loser of an election that in fact the voting machines weren’t hacked.” “You have to take into account the possibility that the loser will rally his troops and complain about the result,” he adds. “The election machinery, both organizational and technical, all of that has to be of sufficiently high quality, and resistant to attack, that you can persuade the loser of an election that they fairly lost.” That makes election security as much of a political problem as it is a technical problem. Voters must have confidence that the voting was fair, regardless of how much money is spent or what security controls are put in place. That makes securing election infrastructure categorically different than almost any other information security challenge today. At present many jurisdictions are struggling to escape the bottomless pit of despair paperless voting, and that’s a no-brainer. But once we raise the bar from wow-crazy-bad to meh-just-not-great, how do we reach a plateau of sustainably trustworthy voting security?