Electronic Election Results are Subject to Manipulation

Voters need to be concerned that election results can be manipulated to favor a particular candidate when the county relies on electronic voting machines. Washington Times

Andrew Appel, a professor at Princeton University, said it would be easy to write a program that cheats on election results and deletes evidence of the hack as soon as the results are reported.    

The analysts didn’t point to any specific election that they knew had been compromised, but they said hackers likely would leave fingerprints only if they wanted to be spotted and hurt confidence in the U.S. electoral system.

“To ignore the fact that the computers are completely hackable and to try to run elections, as some states do, where they entirely rely on the word of a computer program on who won is entirely irresponsible,” Mr. Appel said.

“There’s no perfect security; there’s only degrees of insecurity,” said Ronald Rivest, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

He said hackers have myriad ways of attacking voting machines. “You don’t want to rest the election of the president on, ‘Maybe the Wi-Fi was turned on when it shouldn’t have been.’” 

He and two other computer security experts said bar codes on ballots and smartphones in voting locations could give hackers a chance to rewrite results in ways that couldn’t be traceable, short of sampling of ballots or hand recounts — and those work only in cases where there’s a paper trail.

Citizens need to demand that new voting machines be purchased for Williamson County that have the capability to conduct a paper audit trail. Experts agree that the only protection against fraud is paper.