Auditing Elections for Signs of Hacking

Excellent essay pointing out that election security is a national security issue, and that we need to perform random ballot audits on every future election:

The good news is that we know how to solve this problem. We need to audit computers by manually examining randomly selected paper ballots and comparing the results to machine results. Audits require a voter-verified paper ballot, which the voter inspects to confirm that his or her selections have been correctly and indelibly recorded. Since 2003, an active community of academics, lawyers, election officials and activists has urged states to adopt paper ballots and robust audit procedures. This campaign has had significant, but slow, success. As of now, about three quarters of U.S. voters vote on paper ballots. Twenty-six states do some type of manual audit, but none of their procedures are adequate. Auditing methods have recently been devised that are much more efficient than those used in any state. It is important that audits be performed on every contest in every election, so that citizens do not have to request manual recounts to feel confident about election results. With high-quality audits, it is very unlikely that election fraud will go undetected whether perpetrated by another country or a political party.

Another essay along similar lines.

Related: there is some information about Russian political hacking this election cycle that is classified. My guess is that it has nothing to do with hacking the voting machines — the NSA was on high alert for anything, and I have it on good authority that they found nothing — but something related to either the political-organization hacking, the propaganda machines, or something else before Election Day.

Posted on December 2, 2016 at 6:39 AM • 206 Comments