There has been a lot of talk in the news lately about election hacking, especially about the Russia government possibly attempting to subvert the upcoming presidential election. And I think that in a lot of ways it is good that this has come up. After all, voting systems are based on networked computer systems. Private election and campaign information is stored and transmitted on networked computer systems. That means that hacking can indeed be a factor in elections, and the public should be made well aware of it. We are always being told by ‘authorities’ and ‘pundits’ what is and is not possible. And generally we are gullible enough to swallow it. But history has a lot of lessons to teach us, and one of the most important is that the ‘impossible’ has a nasty way of just happening.

Authorities are saying now that because of the distributed nature of voting systems and redundancies in voting record-keeping that it would be virtually impossible for an outside party to rig the numbers in the election. But that is just a direct method of affecting an election. What about the indirect methods? What would happen, for instance, if hackers could just cause delays and confusion on Election Day? If they could cause long lines in certain voting districts and smooth sailing in other voting districts, couldn’t they affect the number of Democratic Votes versus Republican votes? We all know that if there is a hassle at the polls that a lot of people will just give up and go back home again. And this is just one way that elections could be affected by hacking. There are bound to be plenty of others.

With this in mind, isn’t it wise to err on the side of caution? Shouldn’t we as a people insist that our voting systems are secured as well as is possible? Don’t we want to consider these systems to be ‘vital infrastructure’? These are the reasons I advocate instituting best practices as the guidance to be used when securing electronic voting systems. Systems should be configured as securely as possible, associated communications systems should be robust and highly encrypted, risk should be assessed and addressed before the election, monitoring efforts should be strictly followed and incident response plans should be practiced and ready to go. These efforts would be one good way to help ensure a fair and ‘hacker free’ election.