Securing the vote: How 'paper' can protect US elections from foreign invaders
When Logan Lamb visited the website of Georgia’s Center for Election Systems in Aug. 2016, what he found left him speechless.
Although the cybersecurity researcher had no password or special authorization, he was able through a Google search to download the state’s voter registration list, view files with Election Day passwords, and access what appeared to be databases used to prepare ballots, tabulate votes, and summarize vote totals.
He also discovered a vulnerability that would allow anyone to take full control of a server used for Georgia’s elections.
It was everything a Russian hacker – or any malicious intruder – might need to disrupt the vote in Georgia.
“Had the bad guys wanted to just completely own the central election system, they could have,” Mr. Lamb told the Monitor in an interview.
It remains unclear how many months or years these vulnerabilities existed prior to the 2016 election. Even more alarming, say computer and election security experts, had a hacker exploited the website’s vulnerabilities, it might have been impossible to detect.
That’s because voters in Georgia cast their ballots on electronic touch-screen voting machines that produce no paper record of each vote. Without such a record, there is no way to verify that a computer hacker didn’t reprogram the vote-counting software to systematically assign more votes to one candidate or another.
More than 20 percent of voters nationwide in the 2016 presidential election cast their ballots on voting machines that did not produce a verifiable paper trail.
Aside from Georgia, four states – New Jersey, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Delaware – also rely entirely on paperless touch-screen voting machines. In addition, paperless machines were used in at least some jurisdictions in 10 other states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida.
To a hacker such voting methods are an open invitation to mischief or worse, security experts say. To officials and experts concerned with securing the accuracy of the US election process, the methods represent a gaping vulnerability.
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