Reports this week of Russian intrusions into US election systems have startled many voters, but computer experts are not surprised. They have long warned that Americans vote in a way that’s so insecure that hackers could change the outcome of races at the local, state and even national level. Multibillion-dollar investments in better election technology after the troubled 2000 presidential election count prompted widespread abandonment of flawed paper-based systems, such as punch ballots. But the rush to embrace electronic voting technology – and leave old-fashioned paper tallies behind – created new sets of vulnerabilities that have taken years to fix. “There are computers used in all points of the election process, and they can all be hacked,” said Princeton computer scientist Andrew Appel, an expert in voting technologies. “So we should work at all points in that system to see how we make them trustworthy even if they do get hacked.”
… “I am not an expert on reading Vladmir Putin’s mind, and I don’t know what he’s up to if anything, but if your goal is to simply cause chaos, then destroying the voter registration databases would be an excellent way to cause chaos,” said Dan S Wallach, a Rice University computer science professor who long has studied the security of election systems.
… The nationwide trend is toward adoption of systems that produce paper and electronic records; they are deployed universally in 35 states and in many counties elsewhere, according to tracking by Verified Voting Foundation, a California-based nonprofit group that monitors voting technologies. Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting Foundation, estimated that more than 75 per cent of US voters cast ballots on machines that create a reliable paper trail.
“When you have voters marking a physical ballot, it’s pretty easy to check – and it’s obvious what’s being counted,” Smith said. “Those physical records of voter intent can be used for a postelection audit to check the software on a system counting the votes or if a candidate requests a recount or one is required because the margin of victory is small. It lets election officials use that record to demonstrate that the count was correct.”
Full Article: US election 2016: Why hackers could tip the result | The Independent.