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from the newer-is-not-necessarily-better dept.
The Intercept reports
The nation's secretaries of state gathered for a multi-day National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference in Washington, D.C., this weekend, with cybersecurity on the mind.
Panels and lectures centered around the integrity of America's election process, with the federal probe into alleged Russian government attempts to penetrate voting systems a frequent topic of discussion.
[...] One way to allay concerns about the integrity of electronic voting machine infrastructure, however, is to simply not use it. Over the past year, a number of states are moving back towards the use of paper ballots or at least requiring a paper trail of votes cast.
For instance, Pennsylvania just moved to require all voting systems to keep a paper record of votes cast. Prior to last year's elections in Virginia, the commonwealth's board of elections voted to decertify paperless voting machines--voters statewide instead voted the old-fashioned way, with paper ballots.
[...] Oregon is one of two states in the country to require its residents to vote by mail, a system that was established via referendum in 1998. [Oregon Secretary of State Dennis] Richardson argued that this old-fashioned system offers some of the best defense there is against cyber interference.
"We're using paper and we're never involved with the Internet. The Internet is not involved at all until there's an announcement by each of our 36 counties to [the capital] Salem of what the results are and then that's done orally and through a confirmation e-mail and the county clerks in each of the counties are very careful to ensure that the numbers that actually are posted are the ones that they have," he said. "Oregon's in a pretty unique situation."
[...] In New Hampshire, the state uses a hybrid system that includes both paper ballots and machines that electronically count paper ballots with a paper trail.
Karen Ladd, the assistant secretary of state for New Hampshire, touted the merits of the system to The Intercept. "We do a lot of recounts, and you can only have a recount with a paper ballot. You can't do a recount with a machine!" she said.
America's paper ballot states may seem antiquated to some, but our neighbors to the north have used paper ballots for federal elections for their entire history. Thanks to an army of officials at 25,000 election stations, the integrity of Canada's elections is never in doubt.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday February 20 2018, @02:56PM
I think the "fixation" on hacking elections is a lot more justified than you make it out.
Busing in illegal voters requires that you find lots of people willing to commit a serious crime in front of lots of witnesses. If it happens there will be lots of available evidence of the fact. If you aren't being shown the actual, solid evidence, it's probably just scaremongering.
Dead people voting may not be quite as obvious - it might involve similar fraudulent voters, but more likely it'll probably involve ballot stuffing at some point when the voting machines or ballot boxes are under-supervised - but that's easy to avoid if you actually implement decent chain-of-custody over the boxes/machines (and if you *don't* have that, then your vote is completely untrustworthy regardless of anything else).
Hacking though can often be done from 5,000 miles away with no evidence, or at best, by anyone competent left alone with the voting or tallying machine for 2 minutes at any point prior to the election. Either way, if it's done even halfway competently there'll be no evidence it happened other than a discrepancy with exit polls.
And yeah, for 99.9% of people, maybe the bus thing would be easier - but it's also very risky. Meanwhile that remaining 0.01% translates to 4 million potential hackers in the US alone, several of whom are already in the pocket of one criminal enterprise or another (political parties of all stripes included), and any *one* of which could potentially hack *every* remotely hackable voting machine in the country, as well as training anyone capable of using a screwdriver how to apply a ready-made hack to those machines that need physical access to compromise.