Is the U.S. Voting System—and Voters' Personal Information—Secure?

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2018

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For democracy to function, we have to trust and accept the results of elections. But that trust is increasingly difficult to maintain in a world where malicious actors like the G.R.U., the Russian intelligence agency, have been actively probing our election systems for technological vulnerabilities. Sue Halpern, who reports on election security, spoke with the researcher Logan Lamb, who found a massive amount of information from the Georgia election system sitting unsecured on the Internet. The information included election officials’ passwords and the names and addresses of voters, and Lamb made the discovery during the time that (according to the Mueller investigation) Russian hackers were probing the system. Georgia is one of a number of states that do not use any paper backup for their balloting, so suspected hacking of voting machines or vote tabulators can be nearly impossible to prove. On top of this, new restrictive voting laws purge voters who, for instance, haven’t voted in the last few elections, so hackers can disenfranchise voters by deleting or changing information in the databases—without tampering with the tallied votes. Susan Greenhalgh of the National Election Defense Coalition tells Halpern that while some states are inclined to resist federal assistance in their election operations, they are poorly equipped to fight cyber-battles on their own.

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1:12.1	I'm Dorothy Wickend. On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker Sue Halpern examines
1:18.9	the security vulnerabilities that threaten America's electronic voting systems.
1:24.4	She'll talk with the security expert, Logan Lamb, about how Russian agents may have infiltrated
1:30.3	Georgia's voting and with Susan Greenhall of the National Election Defense Coalition
1:35.3	about why states may resist federal assistance in securing their election operations.
1:44.6	When we first began learning of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which seemed
1:49.0	absolutely mind-boggling at the time, something that just couldn't happen, it was often
1:53.5	said that Russia had hacked the election.
1:56.1	We quickly learned a more specific, more accurate way of putting it.
1:59.6	Russia had influenced the election by
	...

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