“Two out of the last four presidential elections were so close that a change of a few counties in one state would have changed the result of the national presidential election,” said Andrew Appel, professor of computer science at Princeton University, in an interview with BBC News.<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s not necessary to cheat in 9,000 different jurisdictions. If the election is close in just one state, changing several tens of thousands of votes might be enough.”<\/p>\n
Prof Appel is part of a team of cybersecurity experts that will be working together on Tuesday to advise election officials on cybersecurity-related matters – helping to identify genuine attacks from, say, just your bog-standard computer glitch, of which there may be plenty.<\/p>\n
“There may be questions about some piece of machinery that is showing some symptom,” he explained.<\/p>\n
“Does that look like a hack or is that normal? That kind of question.”<\/p>\n Any security audit, whether it\u2019s to protect a company or a property, focuses on the points of weakness. And in this election, the points of weakness are the electronic voting booths.<\/p>\n The greatest concern of the group, which is mostly a mixture of academics and security professionals, is that the security in place on voting machines in some crucial areas just isn’t up to scratch.<\/p>\n For starters, 10 states use touchscreen-only voting machines, an immediate concern.<\/p>\n “You touch the screen and indicate the candidate you want,\u201d explained Prof Appel.<\/p>\n “There\u2019s no paper involved, and at the end of the day it indicates how many votes the candidate got. There would be no way to tell if it was done fraudulently.”<\/p>\n Several security experts have demonstrated how this process can be tampered with, by installing malicious software capable of changing a switching a person’s vote once it is in the machine, or by spoofing the smart cards used to identify a voter.<\/p>\n Other states use what\u2019s known as optical scan voting. That\u2019s when a voter fills in a little oval on a page to cast their ballot. It\u2019s logged by the computer, to make counting much quicker, but also stored as a hard copy. If the computer says the vote goes a certain way and there\u2019s suspicion of shenanigans, it can be crossed checked against the paper copy.<\/p>\n Most at-risk<\/strong><\/p>\n So where are the \u201chack states\u201d?<\/p>\n Verified Voting is an organisation that tracks the use of voting machines, and their security, across the US. It\u2019s a painstakingly put together dataset which gives you an idea of the complexity of the US voting system.<\/p>\n By using this resource, and combining it with polling data, Mr Bernhard and Prof Halderman were able to isolate key states with both poor voting booth security and a tight race.<\/p>\n They named the most at-risk states as: Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Colorado.<\/p>\n “As jurisdictions with close races are most vulnerable to having their results perturbed or cast into doubt, these are the ones to be concerned about,\u201d the researchers wrote.<\/p>\n What else could go wrong?<\/strong><\/p>\n Most experts are in agreement that the voting machines provide the biggest risk. The key under the mat for anyone looking for a way in.<\/p>\n But hackers may look to other means to agitate the process.<\/p>\n “A well resourced adversary, for instance a foreign government, could do plenty of other things to disrupt the election,\u201d wrote Mr Bernhard and Prof Halderman.<\/p>\n “Cutting the power to a few key precincts could throw the entire election into chaos.”<\/p>\n Furthermore, Prof Appel pointed to previous incidents in which voter registration databases were breached. In September, the FBI urged districts to work with the DHS to ensure their database systems were secure.<\/p>\n “The thing that could go wrong is that a voter could show up at the polling place and be told they\u2019re not listed when in fact they should be listed,\u201d Prof Appel explained.<\/p>\n In concluding their data analysis on the at-risk states, Mr Bernhard and Prof Halderman offered a summary.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 2016 election is less secure than it should be.<\/p>\n “While we think it\u2019s unlikely that hackers will be able to silently change who wins, attacks that attempt to disrupt or discredit the electoral process in critical states are a distinct possibility.”<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The concern that the 2016 US presidential election may be hacked, by Russia or some other bad actor, could hold the same place in history as the Millennium Bug: a whole load of worry over nothing. “Unless the election is extraordinarily close, it is unlikely that an attack will result in the wrong candidate getting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":266180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[106],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"A](\"http:\/\/ichef-1.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/30B7\/production\/_92317421_whatsubject.jpg\")
A voter casts his ballot in Utah<\/span><\/figure>\n