National: Despite Fears, This Election Could Be More Secure Than Ever | MIT Technology Review

Fear that hackers could exploit vulnerabilities in our voting systems could undermine voter confidence this November, especially if the vote ends up being close. The good news is that it is also helping fuel an important discussion about how the U.S. should secure its elections. Recent hacks on the Democratic National Committee, for which the White House has officially blamed Russia, along with reports that hackers have targeted online voter registration databases in more than 20 states, have made it clear that adversaries are inclined to disrupt the American political system using cybercrime. The attacks prompted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to begin assisting state and local election boards on cybersecurity matters. Congress has held multiple hearings to assess the national election system’s technical weaknesses and explore ways to account for them. And there have been countless media reports (including some from MIT Technology Review) cataloguing vulnerabilities like Internet-connected voting registration databases and absentee ballot-return systems, as well as electronic voting machines that don’t produce paper audit trails.

National: 7 Ways Electronic Voting Systems Can Be Attacked | Dark Reading

Concerns about the fragility of US electronic voting systems to cyberattacks go back to 2002 when the Help America Vote Act was passed mandating the replacement of lever-based machines and punchcards with more modern voting equipment. Those concerns have been greatly amplified this election season with reports of attacks on voter registration systems in some 20 states and intrusions into the Democratic National Committee’s computers by hackers believed to be out of Russia. The attacks have stirred considerable fears about foreign adversaries and nation-state actors somehow disrupting the elections and even manipulating the outcome of the voting to favor one of the two major party candidates. … In all states but five, a vast majority of the electronic voting equipment that voters use will have paper backups. Some voters will use what are known as Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems to cast their votes electronically. Others will mark their choices on a paper ballot and feed it into an optical scanner that will do the ballot counting. In both cases, voters and election officials will have a so-called Voter Verifiable Paper Audit trail that will provide a reliable backup even if the machines fail or are somehow compromised.

National: Could the U.S. election be hacked? | USA Today

The impact of Russian hacking on the upcoming presidential election was a topic in Sunday night’s debate, raising the question: Is the U.S. election hackable? Experts say at the national level, no. But there could be individual incidents that undermine faith in the system. There’s almost no danger the U.S. presidential election could be affected by hackers. It’s simply too decentralized and for the most part too offline to be threatened, according to the head of the FBI and several security experts. “National elections are conducted at the local level by local officials on equipment that they obtained locally,” so there’s no single point of vulnerability to tampering here, said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that advocates for elections accuracy. … The biggest question in the mind of voting security expert Joseph Kiniry is whether the 2016 election will be Y2K or Pearl Harbor.

National: Hacking the election: questions and answers | Phys.org

The US government’s accusation that Russian government-directed hacking aimed to disrupt the November election comes amid fears about the security of the voting process. The attacks have included breaches of emails of political organizations—blamed on Russia—as well as probes of state voter databases, for which US officials have said they cannot determine the source.
Here are some questions and answers: Can hackers affect the November election results? This is unlikely, voting experts say. There is no single, centralized hub to be hacked, and the system is comprised of over 100,000 precincts and polling places. “While no system is 100 percent hack-proof, elections in this country are secure, perhaps as secure as they’ve ever been,” David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research told a recent congressional hearing. “There isn’t a single or concentrated point of entry for a hacker.” … Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University who studies voting systems, told lawmakers the biggest vulnerability is voter registration databases. Wallach testified at a House of Representatives hearing on election security that such an effort “can selectively disenfranchise voters by deleting them from the database or otherwise introducing errors.”

National: 5 ways to improve voting security in the US | PCWorld

With the U.S. presidential election just weeks away, questions about election security continue to dog the nation’s voting system. It’s too late for election officials to make major improvements, “and there are no resources,” said Joe Kiniry, a long-time election security researcher. However, officials can take several steps for upcoming elections, security experts say. “Nobody should ever imagine changing the voting technology used this close to a general election,” said Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa. “The best time to buy new equipment would be in January after a general election, so you’ve got almost two years to learn how to use it.” … Some states conduct extensive pre-election tests of their voting equipment, but other tests are less comprehensive, said Pamela Smith, president of elections security advocacy group Verified Voting. Most jurisdictions conduct pre-election voting tests, but many “randomly select some machines” after ballot information, such as candidates’ names, is programmed in, Smith said. Testing all voting machines before an election would be more secure, she said.

Maryland: Security Experts Question Maryland’s Online Ballot System | Associated Press

A new online ballot system and marking tool could weaken Maryland’s voting security and make it the most vulnerable state in the nation, according to some cybersecurity experts. On Sept. 14, the Maryland State Board of Elections voted 4-1 to certify a new voting system and marking tool for online ballots. The new system will allow all Maryland voters the ability to both make selections on a computer and print absentee ballots from home, and send them into the State Board of Elections. Nikki Charlson, the deputy state administrator of the Board of Elections, said the system and tool are as secure as possible. “We are following all of the best practices for IT systems,” she said. Experts in cybersecurity and computer science have publicly stated they believe the potential risks with the new method of voting outweigh the benefits.

National: Computer Science Professor: Many hurdles preventing emergence of online voting | Purdue Exponent

The search for solutions to increase voter numbers on Election Day continues as states have underwhelming turnouts in both presidential and non-presidential election years. But Eugene Spafford, computer science professor at Purdue, says online voting is not one of those solutions. The most important aspects of an election are privacy and accuracy for citizens and, from the standpoint of candidates, the vote total accountability. However, current online technology available to the average citizen dictates that you can’t have it all, says Spafford, the executive director of Purdue’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. “Voting by Internet sounds attractive, but either we have to give up the anonymity of the ballot, which is not a good practice, or we have to give up the ability to confirm that the count is correct,” he said in a press release.

National: 3 nightmare election hack scenarios | CSO Online

The question on the mind of many voting security experts is not whether hackers could disrupt a U.S. election. Instead, they wonder how likely an election hack might be and how it might happen. The good news is a hack that changes the outcome of a U.S. presidential election would be difficult, although not impossible. First of all, there are technology challenges — more than 20 voting technologies are used across the country, including a half dozen electronic voting machine models and several optical scanners, in addition to hand-counted paper ballots. But the major difficulty of hacking an election is less a technological challenge than an organizational one, with hackers needing to marshal and manage the resources needed to pull it off, election security experts say. And a handful of conditions would need to fall into place for an election hack to work. Many U.S. voting systems still have vulnerabilities, and many states use statistically unsound election auditing practices, said Joe Kiniry, a long-time election security researcher. “With enough money and resources, I don’t think [hacking the election] is actually a technical challenge,” said Kiniry, now CEO and chief scientist at Free and Fair, an election technology developer. “It’s a social, a political, and an infrastructural challenge because you’d have a medium-sized conspiracy to achieve such a goal. Technically, it’s not rocket science.”

National: Can you hack the vote? Yes, but not how you might think | Network World

With Donald Trump already talking about the presidential election being rigged, Symantec has set up a simulated voting station that shows how electronic systems might be hacked to alter actual vote tallies for just a few hundred dollars. They found that while it’s possible to change the number of votes cast for each candidate, it would be very difficult to do so on a large enough scale to swing the election one way or the other. However, enough machines in random precincts could be provably compromised so that general public confidence in the official outcome would be undermined, says Samir Kapuria, Symantec’s senior vice president for cyber security. Using a voting-machine simulator that contains an aggregate of known vulnerabilities from real-world voting machines and some that Symantec found itself, Kapuria demonstrated several ways attackers could taint voting results.

Pennsylvania: Voting machines could be susceptible to hackers | The Ledger

Ever since Pennsylvania began using computerized voting machines a decade ago, critics have worried that hackers could throw an election by shifting votes from one column to another. But that’s far from the only fear in 2016, a year when Illinois’ voter registration database has been hacked and Democratic Party emails were purportedly raided by Russian hackers. “People have talked about Russia supporting Donald Trump,” said University of Iowa computer science professor Douglas Jones, who co-authored a 2012 book about election security. “But I think it would be to their advantage just to have a chaotic election, one that would weaken whoever won. … And if you wanted to cook an election, you don’t have to do anything massive.”

National: Computer researcher to Congress: ‘It’s possible’ for hackers to alter election | Politico

Hackers could influence the outcomes of November’s elections, a computer science professor who has demonstrated security weaknesses in voting machines told lawmakers on Wednesday. “It’s possible,” said Andrew Appel, a professor at Princeton University, at a House Oversight IT subcommittee hearing focused on election cybersecurity. But Appel, who has hacked voting machines used in many states, was the only one to reply affirmatively when subpanel Chairman Will Hurd (R-Texas) asked for a “yes” or “no” answer to the question, “Can a cyberattack change the outcome of our national elections?” The four other people testifying — including a secretary of state, the chairman of the federal agency that assists with elections, a top Department of Homeland Security cyber official and the head of a public policy firm’s division focused on voting rights — all essentially answered “no.

National: New efforts to ensure election data is secure | Insights

The U.S. presidential election is just weeks away, and concerns have been raised about the security of election data. There have already been isolated incidents of voter registration databases being hacked in Illinois and Arizona. According to the nonprofit group VerifiedVoting.org, which lobbies for voting systems, there are substantial vulnerabilities with voting machines used in the U.S., with many running on the Windows XP operating system, for which support was ended in early 2014. A spokesperson for the organization states that this makes them susceptible to malware and denial-of-service attacks that could leave voters unable to cast their votes. The state of Virginia has decertified huge numbers of voting machines due to the ease with which they can be hacked remotely by people with little expertise.

National: In ballots we trust: E-voting, hacking and the 2016 election | Mashable

A vote is an act of conscience and will. It’s also an act of trust. You’re not just marking a ballot for your candidate of choice, your signifying your belief in the system. Your mark will be counted. Your voice will be heard. However, as we prepare to elect a new U.S. president, the American electorate is faced with the unnerving possibility that the results could be hacked and that sacred trust could be broken. At risk, the election system itself. … According to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology, voting systems are not “not connected to internet and…the diversity of system themselves poses a problem for anyone who wants to hack our elections. To attack them in a way to change votes would be quite difficult.” It’s the systems that support the election process that has them, the U.S. government and cyber-security experts worried. “To me, [our elections] look like a giant bulls eye with a U.S. flag in the center. Russian hackers will take aim. The recent DNC hack is clear evidence that hostile nation states can and will attempt to influence the U.S. presidential contest,” said Steve Morgan, founder of the cyber security research firm CyberSecurity Ventures. Perhaps the scarier question is not if they will try to influence our elections, but how.

National: The Internet Is No Place for Public Elections | MIT Technology Review

This election year we’ve seen foreign hackers infiltrate the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail system as well as voter databases in Arizona and Illinois. These attacks have reinforced what political scientists and technical experts alike have been saying for more than a decade: public elections should stay offline. It’s not yet feasible to build a secure and truly democratic Internet-connected voting system.Researchers from government agencies and leading academic institutions studied the issue extensively following the debacle of the 2000 Presidential race, and the consensus emerged that it should not occur. That’s still the case, and today’s rampant cybercrime should be reason enough to keep voting systems disconnected. We have no good defense against malware on voters’ computers or denial of service attacks, and sophisticated adversaries like those behind the attacks on big corporations we’ve seen in recent years will find ways to get into connected voting systems, says Ron Rivest, a leading cryptographer and MIT professor. “It’s a war zone out there,” he says.

National: Cybersecurity Threats Curb Online Voting Company Ambitions | Bloomberg

After multiple hacks of Democratic Party e-mail systems and fears of Russian cyber attacks on the U.S. election, paper ballots have taken on an unexpected appeal. Online voting software companies are convinced convenience-loving Americans will increasingly push to cast their ballots on smartphones and laptops, and they’re working to make that happen. But voter advocates, election officials and others are still leery of the risks involved in conducting elections over the all-too-vulnerable internet. For now, fears about voting security may be giving paper-ballot backers the upper hand where it matters most: Americans’ confidence in the integrity of the election system. “In recent weeks, reports on cyber attacks have voters questioning whether their vote will actually count, and that, in my opinion, is more damaging than the potential for hacking,” Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler told a House committee meeting Sept. 13. The best voting system, he said, is the one which “people of that state feel comfortable voting.”… The U.S. Election Assistance Commission—which develops voluntary guidelines, tests and certifies voting hardware and software—has not certified any internet voting systems. A commission spokesman told Bloomberg BNA it was not clear if an update to its technical guidelines—slated for 2018—would include language about online voting systems. However, the guidelines committee adopted a list of priorities in September 2016 which include discussions on the risks and benefits of electronically returning ballots.

National: Officials Are Scrambling to Protect the Election From Hackers | WIRED

As the United States barrels toward November elections, officials are still looking for last-minute fixes to ensure that the patchwork of voting technology used around the country can fend off the increasingly troubling prospect of hacker attacks. And in the latest of those efforts, Georgia representative Hank Johnson is set to introduce two bills today designed to shore up that fragile system’s security. The Election Infrastructure and Security Promotion Act of 2016 would mandate that the Department of Homeland Security classify voting systems as critical infrastructure, and the Election Integrity Act would limit which voting machines states can buy and also create a plan for handling system failures. The bills reflect a growing debate about whether designating voting tech as critical infrastructure (like the public water supply, energy systems, transportation, communication grid, and the financial sector) would help to secure the U.S.’s highly decentralized voting setup. In the wake of the Democratic National Committee breach and increasingly brazen Russian cyberespionage attacks, concern is mounting about the potential for election hacking in the 2016 presidential race and beyond. Voting registries and election board websites have been compromised, security researchers have shown that electronic voting machines are vulnerable, and agencies like the FBI are on alert.

National: Proposed cybersecurity bills would forbid internet-connected voting machines | FedScoop

A pair of comprehensive, complimentary election infrastructure reform bills, which will be first introduced Wednesday in the House of Representatives, seeks to take all voting machines offline, offers funding for election cybersecurity research and mandates the use of paper ballots across the U.S. by 2018, FedScoop has learned. These two pieces of legislation — named the “Election Infrastructure and Security Promotion Act of 2016” and the “Election Integrity Act,” respectively — are being sponsored by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., a lawmaker whose constituents will rely on paperless ballots to cast their votes in November’s presidential election. “In the wake of the DNC server hack and well-documented efforts by states to suppress the vote, citizens are rightly concerned,” Johnson said in a statement. “We must work to reduce the vulnerability of our crucial voting systems, protect the security and integrity of our electoral process, and ensure all Americans have the opportunity to vote.”

National: States Ask Feds for Cybersecurity Scans Following Election Hacking Threats | Government Technology

A spate of hacking attacks has put U.S. states on edge ahead of November’s presidential vote as election officials rush to plug cybersecurity gaps with help from the federal government. Nine states have asked for “cyber hygiene” scans in which the Department of Homeland Security looks for vulnerabilities in election authorities’ networks that are connected to the internet, according to a DHS official who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. With less than two months before the election, DHS wants more states to sign up. The threat — primarily from foreign hackers or intelligence agencies — affects states that are reliably Democratic or Republican as well as key battlegrounds including Pennsylvania and Ohio, officials and cybersecurity experts said. While hackers may not be able to change the actual outcome from afar, they could sow doubts by manipulating voter registration websites, voter databases and systems used to track results on election night. “We’re certainly on high alert,” said Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk in Los Angeles County, the nation’s biggest electoral district. “Across the whole network of services and online applications for the county there are frequent indications of attempts to get into those systems.”

National: See How Likely It Is That Your Voting Booth Gets Hacked | TIME

In a world where we can program our refrigerators to order more milk or conjure images of distant galaxies with a few swipes on a smartphone, it’s significant that the best, most reliable technology available on Election Day 2016 is good, old-fashioned paper. “It seems counterintuitive, but paper is a technology that just happens to work really well for elections,” says Pamela Smith, the president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for accurate and transparent elections. “You can’t hack a piece of paper. Voters can mark it and see their vote, and then the ballots can be collected and double-checked.” … The real problem, said Lawrence Norden, the deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice Democracy Program, lies with the nearly 40 million Americans who won’t be voting on paper, again based on 2012 figures. Those voters will instead be saddled with electronic voting machines (the yellow and red-colored counties on the map), many of which are more than a decade old, lack basic cybersecurity protections, and utilize hardware no more sophisticated than a stripped down, Bush-era laptop. In 42 states, electronic voting machines are more than a decade old, according to Norden’s research. (Many states still use such machines for voters who require special assistance.)

National: Sowing Doubt Is Seen as Prime Danger in Hacking Voting System | The New York Times

Russian hackers would not be able to change the outcome of the United States presidential election, the nation’s most senior intelligence and law enforcement officials have assured Congress and the White House in recent weeks. But disrupting it, they acknowledge, would be far easier — causing doubts in battleground states, prompting challenges to results and creating enough chaos to make Florida’s hanging chads seem like a quaint problem from the analog age. By some measures, in fact, the disruption has already begun. And meddling around the edges of an election could sow doubts about the legitimacy of the results — especially in a year in which the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, has told his supporters that the only way he will lose is if the election is “rigged,” and while campaign officials for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, have held a series of meetings about preparing for the possibility that the vote will be hacked. The White House has declined to name Russia publicly as the chief suspect in a series of recent hacks, and has worded its public warnings carefully. The greatest danger, Lisa O. Monaco, President Obama’s domestic security adviser, said on Wednesday, is from attempts to cause “concern or confusion” about the voting system.

National: Lawmakers weigh federal role in preventing election hacks | The Hill

The House Science Committee met Tuesday to discuss efforts to safeguard the November elections from hacking threats, with lawmakers pressing officials on the potential danger and the federal response. Concerns over an election hack have grown after recent breaches to Illinois and Arizona’s online voter registration databases and the Democratic National Committee email hack. “Rightly, we should be concerned about the integrity of our election system,” said Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who pressed witnesses on whether elections should be treated as critical infrastructure requiring federal support. “Typically, whatever we get involved with doesn’t run as well as if the state is doing it themselves,” he cautioned.

National: Can your vote be hacked—after you cast it? | The Parallax

In early August, Donald Trump began expressing fear that the U.S. presidential election would be “rigged” against him. “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” Trump told an audience in Columbus, Ohio. While much has been written about his remarks—as well as several others he made in the weeks following the Democratic National Convention—it remains an open question whether electronic databases storing votes can be hacked and manipulated. Voting has entered the digital era on two fronts. Electronic voting machines and, in some locations, Internet voting have introduced numerous opportunities for hackers to alter voting records. It is the security of massive spreadsheets recording the will of the people that concerns Richard Forno, a computer security expert who recently thrust himself into the national debate over the hackability of U.S. elections by publishing a column on the subject. “Everyone’s focusing on the edges of the network, the voting machines, but no one’s looking at the databases,” Forno, a career computer security expert and currently the director of the Graduate Cybersecurity Program at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, tells The Parallax.

National: Can the vote really be hacked? Here’s what you need to know | CS Monitor

Recent cyberattacks on state voter databases and the Democratic National Committee are raising fresh concerns that hackers could manipulate the upcoming presidential election. … “When people hear how the Russians have infiltrated political parties or state election sites, they immediately jump to, ‘Oh, they can flip votes and change the result of an election,’ ” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. That’s much easier said than done, said Mr. Norden. State boards of elections and law enforcement officials are working to protect the vote, and election officials do have measures in place to safeguard elections. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security said it will monitor closely for suspected breaches on voting systems and work with election boards to bolster their security. Still, according to Norden and other experts, more needs to be done. Here’s a closer look at potential problems at today’s ballot box and some solutions to harden the vote against hackers.

National: Why Can’t Americans Vote Online? | Tom’s Guide

If we were to poll the readers of this article, we would likely find that the vast majority of readers — if not all — regularly shop online, make banking transactions online, fill out registrations and applications online, pay taxes online and maybe even vote for contestants in reality shows online. Yet Americans cannot vote for candidates for public office online. … But experts warn that online voting isn’t as simple as it sounds. Even though it has already been tried in a few places around the world, it probably can’t be secured. We already worry about hackers stealing our credit cards and our identities. If we voted online, we would have to worry about hackers stealing our elections, too.… Several countries have experimented with online voting, but none has forged ahead as far as the tiny Baltic country of Estonia, where nearly a third of ballots are cast online. But Estonia’s elections don’t look anything like those of the United States, where more votes are cast in some cities than in all of Estonia. The Estonian online voter must plug a national ID card — mandatory for all Estonians older than 15, and each of which has an embedded encrypted chip — into a card reader attached to his or her computer. It sounds secure, but two independent assessments, led by Verified Voting in 2011 and the University of Michigan in 2014, found serious flaws with the system.

National: Possible Russian Meddling with US Elections Worries Key Defense Officials | VoA News

Top U.S. defense officials insist they are not turning a blind eye to fears that Russian hackers are trying to hijack upcoming U.S. presidential and local elections. Still, the scope of the threat and just how the U.S. plans to respond remain unclear. “This continues to be an issue of great focus,” said Adm. Michael Rogers, who serves as both National Security Agency Director and chief of the Defense Department’s Cyber Command. “I’m not going to characterize this activity,” Rogers told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, but added “I think there are scenarios where you could see capability applied.” The question was first raised by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, a long-time Republican senator from Arizona who is running for reelection … “They need not attack every county in every state,” said Rice University Professor Dan Wallach. “It’s sufficient for them to go after battleground states where a small nudge can have a large impact.”

National: America can’t promise secure vote | McClatchy

Is it time to panic about Election Day? Not about the choices for president, but about whether the votes that millions of Americans will cast Nov. 8 will be secure. “My level of concern is pretty high,” said Thomas Hicks, chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan group created to develop guidelines following the disputed 2000 presidential election. Experts are warning that in a year of unending political drama, still more might be in store, from Russian hackers to obsolete voting machines prone to breakdowns, all with the potential for causing considerable political chaos. … Computer security experts have long expressed concerns about the vulnerabilities of state voter registration rolls and the frailties of older voting machines. “Flipped votes, freezes, shutdowns, long lines and in the worst-case scenarios, lost votes and erroneous tallies,” is how a report last year, “America’s Voting Machines At Risk,” described the recurring problems of older machines. It was written by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan public policy and legal research center at the New York University School of Law.

National: Paperless voting could fuel ‘rigged’ election claims | Politico

Voters in four competitive states will cast ballots in November on electronic machines that leave no paper trail — a lapse that threatens to sow distrust about a presidential election in which supporters of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have raised fears about hackers tampering with the outcome. The most glaring potential trouble spots include Pennsylvania, where the vast majority of counties still use ATM-style touchscreen voting machines without the paper backups that critics around the country began demanding more than a decade ago. It’s also a state where Trump and his supporters have warned that Democrats might “rig” the election to put Clinton in the White House, a claim they could use to attack her legitimacy if she wins. Similar paperless machines are used heavily in Georgia, where the presidential race appears unusually close, and to a much smaller extent in Virginia and Florida, both of which are phasing them out. Florida has almost entirely abandoned the electronic machines following a number of elections that raised red flags, including a close 2006 congressional race in which Democrats charged that as many as 16,000 votes went missing.

National: Hack the vote: Experts say the risk is real | CSO Online

You should be worried about the November election. Not so much that the candidates you support won’t win, but about the risk that the “winners” may not really be the winners, due to hackers tampering with the results. Or, that even if the winners really are the winners, there will be enough doubt about it to create political chaos. This is not tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. The warnings are coming from some of the most credible security experts in the industry. Richard Clarke, former senior cybersecurity policy adviser to presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, wrote recently in a post for ABC News that not only are US election systems vulnerable to hacking, but that it would not be difficult to do so. “The ways to hack the election are straightforward and are only slight variants of computer system attacks that we see every day in the private sector and on government networks in the US and elsewhere around the world,” he wrote, adding that, “in America’s often close elections, a little manipulation could go a long way.”

National: Fear and hacking on the campaign trail: Will votes be secure? | McClatchy

Is it time to panic about Election Day? Not about the choices for president, but about whether the votes that millions of Americans will cast Nov. 8 will be secure. “My level of concern is pretty high,” said Thomas Hicks, chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan group created to develop guidelines after the disputed 2000 presidential election. Experts are warning that in a year of unending political drama, still more might be in store, from Russian hackers to obsolete voting machines prone to breakdowns, all with the potential for causing considerable political chaos. … Nervousness over the apparatus by which the next president will be chosen seemed inevitable. Computer-security experts have long expressed concerns about the vulnerabilities of state voter-registration rolls and the frailties of older voting machines.

National: Voting machines are still too easy to hack | InfoWorld

People have trouble prioritizing risk. For example, you often hear about the threat of voter fraud, when all evidence suggests that the risks of such fraud are inconsequential. In truth, hacked voting machines are much more likely to affect an election’s outcome. Why would an election fraudster try to herd a flock of criminal participants to the polls when one mildly talented hacker could cause far more trouble? On a state-by-state level, most presidential elections are decided by many thousands of votes. For example, in 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by more than 166,000 votes in the swing state of Ohio. Even in the 2000 election, the closest presidential contest ever, what sort of Houdini could have marshaled the miscreants necessary to cast a few hundred fake votes to tip the balance without getting caught? A hack of a single voting machine could accomplish the same objective.