Our Voting System Is Hackable by Foreign Powers

Author: David Dill This article appeared originally in the March 2017 issue of Scientific American. The FBI, NSA and CIA all agree that the Russian government tried to influence the 2016 presidential election by hacking candidates and political parties and leaking the documents they gathered. That’s disturbing. But they could have done even worse. It…

Give Us The Ballot | Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The following passage is excerpted from a speech that Dr. King delivered before the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington on May 17 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education and eight years before the enactment of the Voting Rights Act.  Three years ago the Supreme Court of this nation rendered in…

A Democracy Worth the Paper — Ballot — it’s Written on

Authors: Mark Halvorson and Barbara Simons This oped appeared originally at Medium.com on December 19, 2016. As the CIA digs deep to investigate foreign influence on our election, we should recognize that we don’t need cybersecurity experts to tell us if our votes have been accurately counted. Citizen observers can do the job, if we…

Election Security Is a Matter of National Security

Author: David Dill This article appeared originally at Scientific American on November 30, 2016. State-sponsored cyber-attacks seemingly intended to influence the 2016 Presidential election have raised a question: Is the vulnerability of computerized voting systems to hacking a critical threat to our national security? Can an adversary use methods of cyber-warfare to select our commander-in-chief?…

Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots

This response was originally posted at Medium.com and is cross-posted here with permission of the author. You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states. That article, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons…

Election Integrity: Missing Components to Remedy

Author: Candice Hoke This oped appeared originally at the The Hill on November 8, 2016. Our election systems’ vulnerabilities received unprecedented bipartisan and media attention from mid-summer onward, sparked by the apparently Russian origins of hacks into the Democrat’s communications systems. If tampering with the U.S. election process was a goal, then election technologies used…

Security Against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence

Author: Andrew W. Appel This article was originally posted to Freedom to Tinker on August 17, 2016. There’s been a lot of discussion of whether the November 2016 U.S. election can be hacked. Should the U.S. Government designate all the states’ and counties’ election computers as “critical cyber infrastructure” and prioritize the “cyberdefense” of these…

How Not to Measure Security

Author: Jeremy Epstein This article was originally posted at Freedom to Tinker on August 10, 2015. It is reposted here with permission of the author. A recent paper published by Smartmatic, a vendor of voting systems, caught my attention. The first thing is that it’s published by Springer, which typically publishes peer-reviewed articles – which…