Is US Tuesday Elections Safe From Hackers?

The 2016 election year has been one fraught with digital insecurity as there are regular reports of another hack, leak or attempt to breach some aspect of the American election system.

From the DNC email hacks to compromised voter registration systems and Donald Trump’s own declarationthat this year’s election could be “rigged,” an increasing amount of doubt has been stirred in the minds of Americans concerning the integrity of our voting system. And voters aren’t the only ones with apprehensions about the security of this year’s vote.

“There is absolutely valid concern about the security or hackability of e-voting systems with regard to the core foundational elements of a good voting system”  Dana Simberkoff, Chief Compliance and Risk Officer at AvePoint, a Microsoft partner that helps companies migrate and protect their data, told IBTimes. “Specifically anonymity, accuracy, security and scalability,”

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in September, FBI Director James Comey said there are valid reasons to be concerned about the integrity of state voter registration systems, but that the actual voting process remains “very, very hard to hack” because it is so “clunky” and dispersed.

“The beauty of the American voting system is that it is dispersed among the 50 states and it is clunky as heck. A lot of people have found that challenging over the years, but the beauty is that is it’s not exactly a swift part of the internet of things so it is hard for an actor to reach our voting process … it’s Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop at the gym,’’ said Comey. “These things are not connected to the Internet.’’

Comey’s statement brings to light the two strongest arguments for why the American election system is difficult to hack: decentralization and air gapping.

Like many aspects of American government, our election system is decentralized by design. Each state, county and local government system is in charge of managing its own voting systems and those systems vary from place to place. Though most systems useincredibly dated and insecure voting machines, which have proven easy to compromise by numerous hackers, government official don’t see them as a major cause for concern due to air gapping, meaning none of the machines are connected to the internet or each other. The argument continues that, even if a single machine is compromised, it would take a massive and widespread effort to compromise enough machines across the nation to make any impact. This has lead some cybersecurity experts like Nicholas Weaver, of the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, to assert that hacking the election via voting machine is basically impossible.

“Nobody is going to be able to change the outcome of the presidential vote by hacking voting machines,” Weaver toldCNN. “The system is too distributed, too decentralized, too many implementations for any individual actor or group to make substantial change."