Election officials and cybersecurity experts on Tuesday dismissed the possibility that the nation’s election systems could be hacked, in part because the voting infrastructure in the country is too decentralized.
“Are we concerned about potential interference into our election process? We absolutely are, but voter fraud is much harder to accomplish than you think,” Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler told the House Science Committee. “We have some 10,000 jurisdictions of voting in this country, hundreds of thousands of voting machines in various locations. The complexity of our election system has reinforced the election process.”
Those comments run contrary to remarks made by some federal officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who stressed in August that federal officials were on hand to help states that request assistance with cybersecurity.
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Officials on Tuesday said the main vulnerability was with voter registration systems, rather than direct manipulation of election results. “Trying to rank these vulnerabilities, I’m going to rank them relative to access. I think our voter registration systems are most accessible, so I’m most worried about them,” said Dan Wallach, a professor of computer science at Rice University.
“I’m secondarily concerned about the tabulation systems, and then I’m concerned about the voting systems themselves, particularly the paperless ones. It’s very hard for a remote Internet attacker to overwrite printed paper,” Wallach added.
“There is no evidence that ballot manipulation has ever occurred in the United States,” Schedler pointed out. “No state, I want to make that clear, has Internet voting, and our voting machines are never connected to the Internet. In Louisiana, all machines are stored in secure, state-owned warehouses, all maintenance … is performed by vetted secretary of state employees, not outside contractors.”
Hackers linked to Russia breached an election database in Illinois in August and attempted to hack another in Arizona. The incident followed earlier breaches of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Democrats have tried to link the intrusions to the election, and tried to portray Russia as a villain siding with Republicans.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher pointed out that the panel contradicted that portrayal. “We have seen article after article … on how Russia is compromising the integrity of our election system … and the panel is just saying that is false,” the California Republican said.
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“We want our country to be safe, but we also don’t want to just continually vilify Russia and turn them into the bad guys. If we’re going to have integrity in our system, I think we have to look at home for some of the real threats to the integrity of our voting system,” he added. “The old-fashioned way of stealing elections has been around for a long time, and we should be insisting to make sure that we don’t have people, for example, voting who are not eligible to vote, because they’re perhaps not citizens or here illegally.”
Schedler said the federal government should stay out of state elections. “Do we really want to create a new TSA for elections in this country, or a new postal service? I just don’t think we need that. The Constitution says very vividly it’s up to the states, the time, place, and manner in which we conduct elections.”
“To go and put the national elections on par with the banking system and electrical grid … in my position is way overreaching, way unnecessary,” he said.
