The Russian meddling that rocked the 2016 US presidential election gave the public a full view of something officials and advocates have warned about for years: weak voting infrastructure and election systems around the US, and a lack of political will and funding to strengthen them. Two and a half years later, real progress has been made in key areas. But with a new presidential election less than 18 months away, glaring systemic risks remain.

Many of those inadequacies show up in a new report from the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which breaks down the threats facing the 2020 election and beyond, and proposes paths to managing them. But as the report also makes clear, many of those necessary steps will not be completed before 2020. Smooth-running elections will require a clear-eyed view of those lingering deficiencies.

"There's good news and bad news when it comes to election security," says Andrew Grotto, a coauthor of the report and program director at Stanford, who previously worked as the senior director for cybersecurity policy at the White House in the Obama and Trump administrations. "As much as we’d like all the recommendations in the report to be implemented, if you can’t implement all of them it doesn’t mean you shouldn't implement some of them. We can still move the needle and improve the quality and resilience of our democracy."

As election officials, democracy advocates, and researchers scramble to make improvements and convince lawmakers of the need for more funding, four areas stand out that still need major work.

Voting Machines

Election experts have long agreed on the need for a paper backup to be generated along with each digital vote. Computerized tallies can potentially be manipulated in ways that paper cannot. But three states—Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina—still use digital voting systems exclusively without a paper backup. And at least 10 states have mixed offerings, in which many precincts don't produce a paper trail.

"With paperless systems the number has been shrinking, but that’s still too many," says Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center's Democracy Program at New York University School of Law. "It’s crazy that we haven’t gotten rid of them by now. And then generally we have a lot of really old machines—over half the counties in the US are using machines that are over a decade old, and that creates security and reliability risks."

One potential model for voting machine security for 2020 comes from Los Angeles County, which has spent a decade and about $100 million designing its own voting machine from open source components and totally rethinking the voting process. Beginning with the March 2020 California primary, Los Angeles voters will have 11 days to vote. When they do, they'll make their choices on a touchscreen, confirm them, feed a paper ballot into the machine, and then press a button to record their final choices on the paper ballot. Election officials will then count both the digital vote records and the paper ballots. Voters can also elect to fill out the ballots by hand instead. And the machines include numerous accessibility features.

Not many election offices have the resources to match Los Angeles County's commitment. But these types of initiatives—which also include a secure, open source voting machine hardware project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—could pave the way for more open, auditable, and publicly verifiable voting machines for everyone.

“I don’t think the for-profit commercial model works particularly well for voting systems, because there’s not enough profit in them to do really good R&D,” says Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a group that promotes election system best practices. A handful of for-profit companies currently provide the majority of voting machines in the US. “The more cost-effective way and the more secure way is investing in secure hardware that would be available to jurisdictions coupled with open source software.”

Federal Funding

Replacing insecure and aging voting machines around the country, introducing post-election audits in the dozens of states that don’t yet have them, shoring up election network defenses, and expanding security personnel all take money. And while independent, locally adjudicated elections are a cornerstone of US democracy, researchers say that federal funding is still badly needed to make sure all election systems around the country have high-caliber security defenses in place.

"If we want to have a strong democracy, there are a lot of things we need to work on regarding our elections." Marian Schneider, Verified Voting

In March 2018, Congress appropriated $380 million to states for election infrastructure and security upgrades through the 2002 Help America Vote Act. And just this week, a House Appropriations subcommittee preliminarily approved a 2020 funding bill that includes a much-needed $600 million for the Election Assistance Commission, which facilitates election infrastructure improvements and disperses federal funds to states. The bill has a long way to go before passage, but amidst other disputes, the election funding didn't specifically draw criticism from lawmakers in early discussions.