Over the past 16 years, only 10 cases of voter impersonation—out of 146 million registered voters—have ever been identified. And yet each election, a vocal political contingent made up primarily of Republicans complains about an alleged epidemic of voter fraud and impersonation. To combat it, they propose—and in many cases successfully pass—laws requiring voters to provide verification of their identity with an ID card, along with verbal confirmation of various pieces of personal data, before they are permitted to vote. As election officials become more reliant on electronic databases, the potential for hackers to commit voter manipulation and election fraud has gone way up. But it’s these very voter ID laws that are partly to blame, despite legislators’ claims that they would make elections safer, according to Joseph Kiniry, CEO of Free and Fair, a provider of secure election services and systems. “The best thing [hackers] could do is to screw up that data prior to the election,” says Kiniry.
Not that there were many good reasons to trust in voter ID laws in the first place. Critics of the laws argue that they make voting unnecessarily difficult or burdensome for Americans who simply want to exercise their right in a democracy. Moreover, they argue that the reason Republicans support voter ID laws is not because they wish to stamp out voter impersonation, but because such laws have a disproportionately negative impact on black and Latino voters who are statistically less likely to possess a photo ID, and more likely to vote Democrat.
But states that passed voter ID laws didn’t just threaten to disenfranchise voters. They made their elections more vulnerable to hackers. And unlike the fearmongering you might hear from security experts over insecure Internet election systems that would allow domestic or foreign hackers to change votes with the flip of a switch, voter ID manipulation is far scarier because it could happen as soon as this year’s election. Maybe it already has.
“Any Internet expert will tell you that Internet voting is a bad idea,” Kiniry says. “But it’s a tiny fraction of the vote. There wouldn’t be massive opportunity for fraud. But I do hold a concern for states with voter ID laws.”
Full Article: Voter ID Laws May Have Actually Increased The Likelihood Of Voter Fraud—By Hackers | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.