“I am not an expert on reading Vladmir Putin’s mind, and I don’t know what he’s up to if anything, but if your goal is to simply cause chaos, then destroying the voter registration databases would be an excellent way to cause chaos,” said Dan S. Wallach, a Rice University computer science professor who has long studied the security of election systems.
When it comes to voting machines, experts say the most secure systems rely on the strengths of old technologies and new ones. Voting machines with optical scanners, for example, use computer technology to read paper ballots in which voters fill in a bubble next to their preferred candidates. This creates both an electronic tally and a paper record, as do some newer touch-screen systems.
The combination is difficult for even the most sophisticated hackers to defeat. Some states require automatic auditing of selected results to verify that computerized and paper totals are the same. In the case of controversy, recounting is a possible if cumbersome remedy.
Systems that collect only digital records offer many possible targets for hackers — at polling machines, at counting stations and on the computers that collect and tally up overall results for a jurisdiction. Princeton researchers showed in 2006 that one widely deployed electronic voting machine was vulnerable to a virus that could be carried on memory cards used to collect totals. Once installed, such a virus could quietly tweak results for years without detection.
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