We’re Still Way Too Vulnerable to Election Hacking
Key midterm races could be thrown, and we may not even realize it
When David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University, got involved in the election integrity movement in 2003, he believed the answer to election security was paper trails. Dill learned that states across the country (and in his own California county) had recently purchased—or were in the process of purchasing—new paperless, fully electronic voting machines, known as direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines. He and other security experts were concerned that with digital-only ballots and votes, the machines provided no viable way to verify election results or prove that voting machine software hadn’t been altered.
The next year, Dill launched Verified Voting, now one of the leading nonprofit election integrity groups in the country, in an effort to push for the adoption of so-called voter-verifiable paper audit trails. The group wanted states to deploy voting methods that had physical paper records that could be used to confirm each individual vote, thereby protecting against electronic tampering.
They wanted states to either use optical-scan machines, which employ full-size paper ballots, or to outfit their touchscreen and other DRE machines with printers that produce a paper scroll showing…
