“When I hear about a hack, and it’s attributed to a Russian IP address, my first reaction is it’s identity theft,” King said. “They’re looking for large lists of critical information that can be used to create identities for credit card theft, etc. I don’t instinctively think it’s an attack on our election system.”
The important point King makes is that hacking the elections system and the voting system are very different in nature and effect. “If the election systems were hacked, there are paper backups of the electors list — every precinct has to maintain a paper copy of the voter list — so you could disrupt an election by attacking those election systems,” he said. “But most importantly, you could not alter the outcome of the election by hacking those systems. That would have to occur in the voting system” — the actual process of casting ballots. And that’s harder than it seems.
After the stories about the hacks of election systems came out, the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections wrote a letter to voters in that state explaining how it protects the voting system itself. The steps delineated are…
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