Hackers looking to disrupt the election on November 8 could have better luck stealing your voter registration information than your ballot. Indeed, election security experts say Internet-connected voter registration databases could prove to be the biggest vulnerability this Election Day. They say election officials should develop contingency plans to safeguard their precincts from cyberattacks, like ensuring that there is a paper record or other kind of reliable backup of the voter database on hand at the polling station. During this election season we’ve seen cyberattacks on the e-mail servers of the Democratic National Committee and state voter registration databases, which have heightened concerns that a nation-state adversary like Russia could use the Internet to disrupt the U.S. elections in November.
Attacks on voter registration databases are the biggest cybersecurity threat facing the election, argues Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University who studies the security of electronic voting systems. If an attacker could damage or destroy these databases, say by deleting names, they could effectively “disenfranchise significant numbers of voters,” Wallach told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology last month during a hearing on election security.
… Hackers could also target a relatively new technology called digital poll books, which election officials are deploying in polling stations all over the country. These systems are essentially computerized versions of the paper lists that poll workers have traditionally used to check in voters. They can shorten wait times and generally improve the convenience of the voting process. But officials in a number of jurisdictions have connected these to the Internet so they can conveniently send information about voter check-ins to other machines important for election management, says Gregory Miller, cofounder of the Open Source Election Technology Foundation, a nonprofit elections technology research institute.
Full Article: How Hackers Could Send Your Polling Station into Chaos.