I’ve been having a little back-and-forth with InfoWorld’s Roger Grimes about security vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system. This was sparked by Roger’s post last week, “Voting machines are still too easy to hack.” The title says it all, but as Roger notes, the risk is mitigated by the fact that voting machines are not connected to the internet. You need physical access to voting machines in order to hack them.
This immediately led me to wonder about the vulnerability of systems that are connected to the internet, particularly in light of recent reports that Russian hackers had breached voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona. What if hackers deleted registered voters wholesale? Some states allow you to register online or through motor-voter initiatives, so the state wouldn’t necessarily have a paper record, nor would many voters. If they weren’t on their designated polling station’s list, they could cast a provisional ballot, but that vote would be invalidated without the state having its own record of registration. Right?
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