Elections Are Too Online

“In theory, voting machines are already offline, even air-gapped. In practice, however, “many polling places around the country transmit voting results to their county election offices via modems embedded in or connected to their voting machines,” The New York Timesreported in 2018, and that’s a point of internet access. Independent investigators in 2019 said they found “nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states connected to the internet,” including systems in swing states Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida—just a “few” weak points. The nonpartisan National Election Defense Coalition says the “assertion that voting machines or voting systems can’t be hacked by remote attackers because they are ‘not connected to the internet'” is a “myth” and has called for results to be transmitted by offline methods, like USB sticks.

That sort of tool would work because the proposal here isn’t that we return to paper ballots in a wooden box or hand-written voter rolls. Paper and the trail it leaves have an important place in electoral security, but I’m not suggesting a completely nondigital approach. We can still have machines as the main counting mechanism, a useful timesaver in uncontested races. Likewise, election authorities can continue to manage voter databases with computers.

Think 1990, not 1890—there’s no need to go full Luddite. But we should disconnect our voting processes from the internet where it’s feasible. We already know online voting is insecure, and given the detrimental effects even small hacks could have on Americans’ confidence in our election outcomes, we’d be wise to harden electoral targets against digital attacks.”

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