When the federal government offered to help states protect their voting data free of charge last fall, seven states flat out rejected the offer, expressing total confidence in their systems: Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
Georgia's secretary of state—whose office had already exposed the personal data of 6 million Georgia voters earlier that year—was particularly dismissive of federal assistance.
“The question remains whether the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security,” Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told a technology blog in August.
The question now remains whether voting in Georgia—which has a highly competitive special election coming up next week—is secure. As Salon noted, Georgia's system—hackable, paperless, and unverifiable—is a serious candidate for the worst system in the country.
It's among the 14 states that leave no verifiable paper trail if irregularities are detected.
If you’re wondering if your county is paperless, this Mother Jones piece has a nifty interactive county-by-county chart where you can find out.
Halderman and other cybersecurity experts are convinced that paper ballots give us the best chance to combat hacks:
I know I may sound like a Luddite for saying so, but most election security experts are with me on this: paper ballots are the best available technology for casting votes. We use two main kinds of paper systems in different parts of the U.S. Either voters fill out a ballot paper that gets scanned into a computer for counting (optical scan voting), or they vote on a computer that counts the vote and prints a record on a piece of paper (called a voter-verifiable paper audit trail). Either way, the paper creates a record of the vote that can’t be later modified by any bugs, misconfiguration, or malicious software that might have infected the machines.
After the election, human beings can examine the paper to make sure the results from the voting machines accurately determined who won.
Naturally, Republicans weren’t convinced earlier this year, and the GOP-led House committee of jurisdiction already voted to eliminate the only federal agency working to ensure the integrity of voting machines in the states.
But the evidence is now overwhelming: Russia attacked our democracy last fall and it's still unclear to what extent they succeeded in manipulating voter rolls. We’ll likely continue to learn more in the coming months. But if there are any true patriots left in the Republican party, they will start working toward the goal of protecting the most fundamental part of our political system from corruption: the right to a free and fair election.
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