The furor over the cyberattacks injecting turmoil into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign obscures a more pervasive danger to the U.S. political process: Much of it has only lax security against hackers, with few if any federal cops on the beat. No one regulator is responsible for requiring campaigns, political operations and state and local agencies to protect the sanctity of the voter rolls, voters’ personal data, donors’ financial information or even the election outcomes themselves. And as the Democrats saw in Philadelphia this past week, the result can be chaos. The most extreme danger, of course, is that cyber intruders could hack the voting machinery to pick winners and losers. But even less-ambitious exploits could sway the results in a close election — anything from tampering with parties’ volunteer schedules and get-out-the-vote operations to deleting the registrations of frequent voters or knocking registration databases offline. Cyber scams aimed at campaign donors’ financial data, such as a just-disclosed hack aimed at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, could deter future contributors by making them fear identity theft. Or, as happened this past week to the Democratic National Committee, online thieves could get hold of a political operation’s embarrassing internal emails, creating headaches for a presidential candidate just before she accepts her party’s nomination.
… Even among government agencies, local and state election agencies aren’t equally equipped to deal with the threat. “It’s so decentralized and you’ve got big counties and small, counties that have a whole IT staff in their office, and counties that have nothing remotely like that, and their election officials are part-time,” said Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog Verified Voting. “There’s a broad diversity of jurisdictions.”
In the week since the DNC’s internal communications went public, concern about the issue “has exploded” on an email list made up of election officials and advocates helping advise the federal government on future voting security, said Joseph Kiniry, CEO of the company Free & Fair. “I can’t even keep up with it right now.”
Still, Florida’s Sancho said only a minority of county election officials nationwide see a clear need for strict federal standards, as well as the funding or buy-in for technological upgrades. “You have to overcome the belief that it’s not needed, that we’re fine,” he said. “That’s a ludicrous belief, but it’s one that really permeates the election business in the United States.” For example, Sancho said his county had to save up for years to buy a system called ClearAudit that allows it to double-check each vote, and a handful of other Florida counties have adopted it as well — but Washington has been little help. “There’s no more money coming for voting technology — none,’” he said. “Excuse me, some of these devices, they shouldn’t be using these devices.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/elections-parties-hacking-226467#ixzz4G4QFR5VZ
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