Concerns over election hacking misplaced but not unfounded

Nature of voting systems should keep them safe from tampering, but 10 states lack paper trails 

County election officials and voting technology experts say the likelihood of the November elections being hacked in a way that affects the outcome is small, but not impossible.

Even if systems are breached, several election administrators told County News they’re confident that the decentralized nature of U.S. elections will offer protection from intruders bent on manipulating or stealing data.

Andrew Appel, a Princeton University computer science professor, also believes that decentralization provides protection. But in testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Information Technology Sept. 28, he said election equipment can be hacked. He should know. He has successfully hacked into voting machines to prove that point.

He called on Congress to “eliminate” touchscreen voting machines “immediately after the November election.” Those direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines leave no paper trail, and hence, whatever vote totals they report, there’s no paper record to back it up.

About 10 states use paperless touchscreen voting equipment, Appel said in an interview. Among them are several of the so-called battleground states for the presidential election — including all or parts of Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia.

“I think this is a serious problem, and the obvious way to fix it is to have those 10 states do what the rest of the states have already done, which is move to paper ballots,” Appel said.

Even for the 40 states that use optical-scan machines with paper ballots, he said, “We can’t 100 percent prevent the computer from being hacked. But that very paper ballot marked by the voter drops into a sealed ballot box under the ‘opscan’ machine. That’s the ballot of record, and it can be recounted by hand, in a way we can trust.”

In the wake of last month’s disclosure that voter registration data in Arizona and Illinois had been targeted, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson offered his department’s help to state and local election officials seeking to protect their systems from cyber-attacks. As of Sept. 30, four counties had requested cyber-hygiene scans, said DHS spokesman Victor de Leon.

In a resolution passed Sept. 12, Shelby County, Tenn. commissioners asked DHS to designate “state and local election systems as part of the nation’s ‘critical infrastructure.’” Its cosponsors, Commissioners Steve Basar and Van Turner, could not be reached for comment. But Turner told The Commercial Appeal newspaper, “States and local jurisdictions are supporting the whole notion that we need to protect the voting franchise from hackers.”

There are more than 9,000 election jurisdictions in the United States, according to Merle King, executive director of the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. He said that while registration databases have been accessed by hackers, the possibility of voting machines’ being compromised is “highly improbable” because, by and large, they are never connected to the internet. “They have multiple internal and external verification procedures to ensure that all of the votes that are cast by the voters and tabulated by the systems are validated,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t threats, and things go wrong in every election, so it doesn’t mean that we’re not concerned about things that can go wrong with the voting system,” he added.

Of greater concern to several election supervisors who were interviewed is that talk of cyber-intrusions and possibly “rigged” elections can undermine the voting public’s trust is the electoral process. Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections for Leon County, Fla., said that malicious intent might not be a hacker’s motivation. “There doesn’t need to be any nefarious reason other than to call into question the credibility of the American process of elections,” he said.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is recruiting poll watchers to monitor the November elections. That bothers Grant Veeder, Black Hawk County, Iowa’s auditor and elections chief. “One thing I don’t like hearing about is candidates encouraging people to take it upon themselves to make sure there isn’t voter fraud at the polling places,” he said. “We have our own safeguards for that, and we have laws about what individuals are allowed at the polling place.”

He said if unauthorized election watchers broke the law or caused a disruption, precinct workers are “empowered” to call police to have them removed. He recalled only one such incident in the 35 years he’s been running elections.

With Election Day now about a month away, elections officials are emphasizing voting security and integrity.

Sancho and King point to the logic and accuracy testing of voting machines and ballots weeks prior to elections, a process that the public can observe. However, Appel said, “L and A” testing cannot detect fraudulent, vote-stealing computer software. “The reason is that the fraudulent software knows whether the machine is in L and A mode or election mode, and it won’t cheat during testing mode.” However, he said the testing can detect “misprogrammed” ballots, such as those with misspelled or misplaced candidates’ names, or the wrong party affiliation, for example.

Appel said one “best practice” that many states have adopted to show transparency in elections is to allow precinct totals to be publicly announced to all witnesses present at each polling place, after voting has ended. “Those witnesses can take the numbers back with them to their candidate’s victory party and add them up from all the precincts themselves, and compare with the list of precincts as published by the county election administrators.”

King has worked with the major associations of U.S. election officials: the National Association of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks (NACRC) and the International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers (IACREOT), which recently merged into a single association.

One of the things he’s stressed to them is continuity planning — for when the unexpected happens or things go wrong. What back-up systems are in place for voting machine failures, flooded polling places or power outages? In 2012, Superstorm Sandy hit just weeks before the presidential election, and its effects lingered for months.

Perhaps no one knows the list of things that can go awry better than Stan Stanart, elections director for Harris County, Texas.

In 2010 when he first ran for office, 67 days before the election the county’s warehouse that stored voting machines burned down, he said, destroying 10,000 voting machines. Vendors went into overtime to provide new machines, and some were borrowed from other counties. Elections in the county have also been beset with power outages, the loss communications between early-voting locations and a chemical spill on Election Day.

Whether it’s a cyber intrusion or a physical threat to election systems, Sancho sees something positive in the heightened focus on security in general. “You really need to look at security as a holistic item,” he said. “It’s not just internet or Wi-Fi, you really need to look at insider attacks as well — ensuring that, for example, access to the critical systems is not allowed to be by one person.

“I’m hoping that this will be the beginning of plans of what can we do to actually reduce the risk to voting systems,” Sancho added. “People must plan, for example, for attacks to their system.”