Elections Are Too Online

[Kamaji]

Elections Are Too Online

We can make our voting systems just a bit dumber and a whole lot safer.

BONNIE KRISTIAN
6.20.2022

Russia might do more than meme us into discord during the 2022 midterm elections, U.S. officials warned in a CNN report Sunday. The Kremlin's operatives might also execute "smaller hacks of local election authorities—done with the deliberate purpose of being noticed—and then [use] that to seed more conspirac[y theories] about the integrity of American elections."

This is a plausible threat, not least because of how much tactical sense it makes for Russian hackers. Why bother engineering a vast state- or nation-wide conspiracy, with all the resources and competence that would require, when you can do a little deliberately clumsy meddling in some town council races and let Americans' animosity and gullibility do the rest? "If something small happens, it will feed into the mania and chaos, and all of a sudden people will think all the elections are completely insecure," Nicole Tisdale, who previously worked for the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN.

The United States has more than 10,000 election authorities, which is part of why large-scale fraud would be so difficult to execute. But for a threat like this—which turns on the appearance of insecurity rather than actual insecurity—that decentralization becomes a liability. It would only take a few weak points to create the desired effect.

The best preventive measure might not be possible to implement in time for the upcoming midterm elections. Updating election infrastructure is a slow and costly process. But it's a radically simple idea: Take our elections offline. Make our voting systems just a bit dumber and a whole lot safer. If we don't want Russian hackers or other unsavories to be able to access our electoral systems, we should not connect those systems to the internet.

In theory, voting machines are already offline, even air-gapped. In practice, however, "many polling places around the country transmit voting results to their county election offices via modems embedded in or connected to their voting machines," The New York Times reported in 2018, and that's a point of internet access. Independent investigators in 2019 said they found "nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states connected to the internet," including systems in swing states Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida—just a "few" weak points. The nonpartisan National Election Defense Coalition says the "assertion that voting machines or voting systems can't be hacked by remote attackers because they are 'not connected to the internet'" is a "myth" and has called for results to be transmitted by offline methods, like USB sticks.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2022/06/20/elections-are-too-online/