It turns out there was more in the weekend's news about which to be terrified than the prospect of lace-curtain Irish prep-school droogs out on a spree. In The New York Times Magazine, Kim Zetter took a long look at how preposterously vulnerable to hacking and mischief the American election system remains. The story begins with a guy named Neil Jenkins, an official in the Obama Department of Homeland Security who, one day, discovered that someone was trying to weasel into the Illinois Board of Elections.

It soon became clear that this would not be the last attack. In early August, Jenkins learned of another breach, this one on an Arizona state website, and it appeared to come from one of the same I.P. addresses that had been used to attack Illinois. This time, the intruders installed malware, as if setting the stage for further assault. Then reports from other states began to pour in, saying that the same I.P. addresses appeared to be probing their voter-registration networks. Against that backdrop, the D.N.C. hack was looking less like an isolated incident.

“We started to ask: Are these things related?” Jenkins recalled. “Are they the same actors? Is this some kind of concerted effort?” He and his team realized that if Russian hackers were trying to disrupt the coming elections, D.H.S. needed to quickly get in touch with the state and local officials who ran them. But whom do you call when there are more than 10,000 election jurisdictions in the United States?...The entire system — a Rube Goldberg mix of poorly designed machinery, from websites and databases that registered and tracked voters, to electronic poll books that verified their eligibility, to the various black-box systems that recorded, tallied and reported results — was vulnerable.

This, of course, is nothing new. But the continuing neglect of what is an existential threat to democracy is going to be a big part of the historical indictment of this period in American history.

Tim Boyle Getty Images

How did our election system get so vulnerable, and why haven’t officials tried harder to fix it? The answer, ultimately, comes down to politics and money: The voting machines are made by well-connected private companies that wield immense control over their proprietary software, often fighting vigorously in court to prevent anyone from examining it when things go awry.

In Ohio in 2004, for example, where John Kerry lost the presidential race following numerous election irregularities, Kerry’s team was denied access to the voting-machine software. “We were told by the court that you were not able to get that algorithm to check it, because it was proprietary information,” Kerry recalled in a recent interview on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show.” He was understandably rueful, arguing how wrong it was that elections are held under “the purview of privately owned machines, where the public doesn’t have the right to know whether the algorithm has been checked or whether they’re hackable or not. And we now know they are hackable.”

(Aside: , Kerry has become quite willing to discuss the possibility that some form of electronic ratfcking cost him Ohio, and therefore the presidency, in 2004.)

Spencer Platt Getty Images

Zetter does a terrific job tracing all the problems with the system—including the troubling relationship between the companies that make voting machines and the Republican Party. And this is what can happen.

Many of the products they make have documented vulnerabilities and can be subverted in multiple ways. Hackers can access voting machines via the cellular modems used to transmit unofficial results at the end of an election, or subvert back-end election-management systems — used to program the voting machines and tally votes — and spread malicious code to voting machines through them. Attackers could design their code to bypass pre-election testing and kick in only at the end of an election or under specific conditions — say, when a certain candidate appears to be losing — and erase itself afterward to avoid detection. And they could make it produce election results with wide margins to avoid triggering automatic manual recounts in states that require them when results are close.

Ever since the improbable results rolled in on Election Day in 2016, many sets of eyebrows have yet to come down. And with every new revelation of Russian ratfcking that emerges in print, or through Robert Mueller's investigation, the eyebrows now probably are halfway down the backs of peoples necks. And while the government repeatedly assures us that no votes were changed, and that no tallies were jiggered, Zetter's not sure.

Did anything like that happen in 2016? The Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence community and election officials have all insisted that there is no evidence that Russian hackers altered votes in 2016. But the truth is that no one has really looked for evidence. Intelligence assessments are based on signals intelligence — spying on Russian communications and computers for chatter or activity indicating that they altered votes — not on a forensic examination of voting machines and election networks. “We should always be careful to point out that there hasn’t been any evidence that votes were changed in any election in this way, and that’s a true fact,” said Matt Blaze, a computer-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a voting-machine-security expert. “It’s just less comforting than it might sound at first glance, because we haven’t looked very hard.” Even if experts were to look, it’s not clear what they would find, he added. “It’s possible to do a pretty good job of erasing all the forensic evidence.”

It is long past time to federalize, if not the elections themselves—and I'm in favor of doing that, too—at least the systems by which we elect our representatives. It is ridiculous that anyone denies this, so ridiculous by now that any opposition should be taken as prima facie evidence of bad faith. There is no reason to oppose this except cheap politics, which have proven quite expensive.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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