Voting Worries, Real and Otherwise
by tristero
I’m less worried about the what’s going on now – which doesn’t mean I’m at all sanguine, this is a very scary election season – than I am about what could happen during and after the voting. There is a very real danger that voting machines could be hacked. Micah Sifry, one of the co-founders of Civic Hall explains in an email blast to members today what the problems could entail:
Rigging
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Tech and politics: Brian Barrett has a must-read piece in Wired about how America’s electronic voting machines could be hacked this November. Three-quarters of the country votes via paper ballots, he notes and only five (DE, GA, LA, SC and NJ) rely exclusively on “direct recording electronic” machines, while others do so partially, like Pennsylvania. Not every state has a provision for conducting a post-election audit to insure confidence in the results, though three that could be swing states—FL, OH and PA—do have relatively strong audit rules on the books.
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As security analyst Bruce Schneier pointed out last week in the Washington Post, Russian hackers could disrupt the election not only by interfering with electronic voting machines, but also by deleting voter records, among other tactics.
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Given that a national voter file with 191 million individual records on it appeared online last December, security experts worry that it would not be difficult for hackers to target state-level voter records to selectively purge people.
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So, while Republican ignominee Donald Trump has started at Sao that the November election might be “rigged” against him, an unprecedented charge that may undermine confidence in the results, there’s also reason to fear that it might be disrupted from abroad.
Gary Legum in Salon expands on this last point, the danger that Trump and his (often armed) followers are unlikely to accept the results of even a perfectly fair election. He has a lot of information on Trump’s prior paranoid history of claiming rigged results. He reminds us that Roger Stone, an unofficial advisor to Trump, was involved in the infamous Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 recount that resulted in 8 years of Bush, Jr.
Jamelle Bouie in Slate shares Legum’s concerns and has more on Stone’s comments.