CNN raises a what initially seems to be a good point in the article “No, the presidential election can’t be hacked” that our election system is very decentralized with a wide variety of different voting implementations, making it very difficult to implement a coordinated attack to meaningfully alter the nation’s election results. Since votes do not go to a nationally centralized server, the task of rigging or hacking the election is considerably more difficult. However, what CNN”s article does not take into consideration is that historically, most states do not influence the outcome of the election, because they almost always tend to vote for the same party. After looking at the map at http://ijr.com/2015/05/317110-election-whiz-reveals-seven-states-really-matter-comes-deciding-president/, one can see that there are only 7 true “swing states”, with a handful of others that lean only slightly to one side of the aisle or the other. This means that a hacker’s target is considerably reduced, from 50 states down to fewer than 15. This isn’t to say that the task is suddenly easy, but hacks wouldn’t need to occur at as large of a scale as you might initially suspect. When combined with the fact that a shocking number of counties and states are using electronic voting equipment that is dangerously outdated and insecure, this invites the opportunity for a malicious attack on the election system. As demonstrated by Princeton professor Andrew Appel in the article “How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes”, old voting equipment is very susceptible to tampering. The question is what do we do about it?
Is it possible to enjoy the convenience and efficiency of electronic voting and also the achieve improved security and reliability? I believe from a technical perspective, yes. If companies can securely allow online banking and users to pay others from their smartphones without fear of losing their savings account, I don’t see why a reliable electronic voting system is not possible from a technical perspective. The issue is the practicality, especially in terms of costs. In their current state, I do believe that we are leaving our electronic voting system susceptible to hacking, but I think with the right technical solutions, this would not be an issue. While the technical solutions for building a secure CRUD application are very good, that isn’t a solution that works for our voting system, because it needs to be decentralized. The current electronic voting system is not connected to the internet, which is what helps prevent cyber-attacks. I would be much more likely to trust an electronic system that had multiple redundancies and provided a strong audit trail. Otherwise, voters are left wondering, even hoping, that their votes were counted correctly. The situation of lost votes described in Bloomberg’s “The Computer Voting Revolution Is Already Crappy, Buggy, and Obsolete” should absolutely never happen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorSenior computer science major at the University of Notre Dame ArchivesCategories |