Election Database Hacks Far More Extensive Than Previously Revealed

Are our elections safe?

Who will be casting their ballots in November? Will you go to the voting booth in a little over a month only to find you are no longer registered?

Cyber security experts fear the Russian government has the determination and capacity to influence our November elections.

As The Washington Free Beacon reports:

While the hackers who targeted Arizona’s election system did not compromise voter data, experts say the “real danger” would be the deletion of voter registrations.

“Let’s say they wanted to intervene on the side of [Donald] Trump. Then what you would do is find a way of invalidating the voter registrations, deleting the voter registrations of 10 percent of the Democrats in the state. That would make 10 percent of them ineligible to vote,” Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at Stanford University, told CBS News.

In an attempt to ease heightened concerns over Russian-linked cyber attacks, state officials penned an open letter to Congress on Monday vowing that the election is safeguarded against breaches given the decentralized structure of voting systems.

1/5 of our state election systems have been hacked. In Illinois, for example, 200,000 personal voter registration records were compromised. It took over a month for the FBI to uncover this security breach.

Voting stations with touch-screen machines that leave no paper trail make us the most vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Offline polling stations “independent of any sort of national database” are immune from said attacks. Some states have responded by moving in that direction and taking their systems offline.

How long might it take to uncover others? Or, to notice that individuals’ voter registration has been removed?

Should all states move offline?

What if more state databases have been attacked and we are unaware?

Could this compromise the November election?

The potential cyber attacks of state election systems might be the hanging chad debacle of 2016. This presidential election has a number of firsts–we might add cyber corruption to the list.

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