Auditing Elections for Signs of Hacking
Excellent essay pointing out that election security is a national security issue, and that we need to perform random ballot audits on every future election:
The good news is that we know how to solve this problem. We need to audit computers by manually examining randomly selected paper ballots and comparing the results to machine results. Audits require a voter-verified paper ballot, which the voter inspects to confirm that his or her selections have been correctly and indelibly recorded. Since 2003, an active community of academics, lawyers, election officials and activists has urged states to adopt paper ballots and robust audit procedures. This campaign has had significant, but slow, success. As of now, about three quarters of U.S. voters vote on paper ballots. Twenty-six states do some type of manual audit, but none of their procedures are adequate. Auditing methods have recently been devised that are much more efficient than those used in any state. It is important that audits be performed on every contest in every election, so that citizens do not have to request manual recounts to feel confident about election results. With high-quality audits, it is very unlikely that election fraud will go undetected whether perpetrated by another country or a political party.
Another essay along similar lines.
Related: there is some information about Russian political hacking this election cycle that is classified. My guess is that it has nothing to do with hacking the voting machines—the NSA was on high alert for anything, and I have it on good authority that they found nothing—but something related to either the political-organization hacking, the propaganda machines, or something else before Election Day.
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Michael Poole • December 2, 2016 7:16 AM
There are four major attack surfaces for election integrity: Admission of eligible voters, the collection of ballots from voters, the counting of ballots, and public belief that the overall process is accurate.
This essay only addresses the second of these, and some of the third. It ignores allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots, keeping eligible voters from casting ballots, “finding” (and including) ballots that were not cast by actual voters, and propaganda attacks on the election process. We must not obsess about some of the attack surfaces to the neglect of others.
We have all seen serious, well-documented, reports of votes being cast by dead, non-existent, or ineligible voters; threats against voters near or at polling places; fliers that tell voters their party votes on the wrong day or at the wrong place; and so forth.
More than one election has been decided during recounts by the discovery of boxes of ballots days or weeks after the election itself. The chain of custody for those ballots was often poorly controlled.
Voter-verified paper ballots address only one part of the problem, and while it is an important part, the attacks on electronic machines seem calculated to reduce public confidence rather than actually improve election security.