A nearly $10 million infusion of cash meant to shore up New Jersey’s highly vulnerable voting system is welcome, but it’s not enough, and it won’t measurably address one big problem – the state’s lack of a verifiable paper record of votes cast. Indeed, the federal grant money the state secured this spring from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is a fraction of what is needed to transform the state’s election infrastructure, which a number of election experts view as susceptible to hacking or worse.
State election officials play down the state’s risk, and say that strong countermeasures are in place to prevent voter fraud and detect abnormalities. However, the lack of a paper voting record in every county of the state save one adds a heightened sense of concern in a time when the entire United States election apparatus has been found to be under attack by outside forces, from Russia and other actors out to sabotage our democratic institutions.
“It’s very likely we’ll be susceptible to hacking,” Aquene Freechild, co-director of a voting campaign for Public Citizen, a liberal nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “The problem in New Jersey is you wouldn’t know if there was a hack or not.”
Full Article: Editorial: More changes needed to safeguard NJ elections.