Bruce Schneier: Our Election Systems Must Be Secured If We Want To Stop Foreign Hackers (schneier.com)

Okian Warrior writes: Bruce Schneier notes that state actors are hacking our political system computers, intending to influence the results. For example, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia was behind the release of DNC emails before the party convention, and WikiLeaks is promising more leaked dirt on Hillary Clinton. He points out, quite rightly, that the U.S. needs to secure its electronic voting machines, and we need to do it in a hurry lest outside interests hack the results. From the article: "Over the years, more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and have flirted with internet voting. These systems are insecure and vulnerable to attack. But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified. We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers' spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines' and systems' resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can't guarantee their security online."

Comments

Lack of anonymity

[Cigaes]

Vote-by-mail, or any system where there is no voting booth with official overseer, lacks anonymity.

Voters need the right of keeping their vote secret, but that is not enough. If voters can show who they voted for, they can be intimidated or otherwise induced into voting for someone in particular. They can of course say who they voted for, but they cannot be allowed to prove it to someone else.

That is what the voting booth is for. With generalized vote-by-mail, we would see much more vote buying and small-scale intimidation such as “vote for my stepbrother if you want to keep your job”.

I am surprised that so few people make that connection when the issue arises.