Newsweek: Can Elections Be Hacked? Online Voting Threatens 32 States, Report Says

Voters cast a minimum of 100,000 ballots using insecure internet methods in the 2016 election, highlighting an overlooked threat to election integrity, according to a report released Wednesday.

Thirty-two states permit some voters—primarily overseas military personnel—to return ballots by email, fax or internet, according to “Email and Internet Voting: The Overlooked Threat to Election Security,” a report produced by the Association for Computing Machinery, Common Cause, the National Election Defense Coalition and R Street.

“There are two concerns with email voting,” in which ballots and voter identification information are typically attached as a PDF or JPEG. “One—the ballots can be intercepted and undetectably altered or deleted. This hack was performed at DEF CON in August. And it’s something academics have long known,” Susannah Goodman, one of the authors of the report, told Newsweek. “Second—emailed ballots can be easily spoofed in a spear phishing attack designed to put malware on a county election official’s computer.” …

The report warns of a dire attack on the election system. If election workers open an infected email attachment, malware could potentially be transmitted to voting machines or ballot scanners across the state. In addition, “it would not be difficult to create an automated process for discarding ballots with undesired votes and replacing them with forgeries,” the report states. …

Rather, paper ballots offer the most secure method of casting ballots. Paper ballots can be altered, but not on the same scale as electronic ones, a point reiterated by a September study published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Part of the problem of implementing this alteration, Goodman said, is an attraction to new technologies, even if they actually make voting systems less secure.

“The point is this stuff is like trying to get rid of germs in flu season. It’s not going to happen. You have to go low-tech. But we love our gadgets, and we love the internet.”