The Department of Homeland Security is in the news as another example of the lax attitude of the federal government towards voting system security. Take a look at this article titled, States May Have to Wait Nine Months for Federal Help Securing Election Systems, by Dell Cameron from Gizmodo:

Congress has done, well, basically nothing to ensure that the 2018 midterm elections won’t be in some way compromised by hackers, even though almost every lawmaker is adamant nothing could be more important than securing the vote. Making matters worse, it now appears that even states willing to accept the federal government’s offers of assistance could be left waiting for help to arrive until just weeks before elections begin.

On Friday, Politico reported that some states may have to wait as long as nine months before Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials can deploy experts to carry out the agency’s most thorough vulnerability assessment. That means, in some cases, election boards may not receive the feds’ help until the November elections are nearly upon them.

Also, some possible Congressional action is only just beginning to show. The following excerpt is from an article from the Ripon Advance News Service, a newspaper published by the The Ripon Society, an organization that “takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 – Ripon, Wisconsin”. Take a look at the article titled, Senators introduce bipartisan election-security bill:

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators on Dec. 21 introduced legislation that would protect America’s administration of federal elections against cybersecurity threats. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), James Lankford (R-OK), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced the bill, which is awaiting action by the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.

Intelligence reports have established that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia hacked campaign accounts, launched cyberattacks against at least 21 state election systems, and attacked a U.S. voting systems software company, according to the lawmakers. While there is no evidence that a single vote outcome was tampered with, the senators said this dangerous precedent should be a wake-up call as the nation moves into the 2018 election cycle.

Lastly, here is a look at how one local election administrator with a tech background views the issue. The following excerpt is from an article titled, Can your vote be hacked?, written by John Odum, the city clerk in Montpelier, Vermont. Take a look:

Let’s start with the bad news. Our voter registration databases are potentially hackable — and, yes, that includes Vermont’s. If networked or wirelessly enabled, voting machines are potentially hackable but, thankfully, in Vermont they aren’t.

To be sure, hacking a database or a machine is probably no easy task — and could potentially involve months, even a year or beyond’s worth of patience on the part of a would-be saboteur, but the potential is there. Why? Because if it’s connected to the internet, any system is potentially hackable, even if it’s password protected. Consider for a moment that the highest profile hacks of the last couple years have included the CIA, NSA and Verizon. If they can be hacked, anybody can. That’s simply a reality we have to come to terms with.

But there’s also good news. Yes, computer security is a moving target (and if anyone ever tries to claim that any system is 100 percent locked down, they’re either uninformed or trying to reassure their customers on the value of whatever hardware or software they’re peddling), but if those tasked with protecting our electronic implementations of democracy are truly vigilant, it doesn’t have to be a crisis.