Predicting Our Future podcast

Episode 8: Hacking Elections, DDoS Attacks, & Online Voting Around the World

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In a 2016 testimony addressing the House Committee on Space, Science & Technology, Dan Wallach warned that the country’s voting infrastructure was vulnerable to hacking by foreign governments. Computer scientists have long spoken of the dangers of electronic voting machines, and now they’re warning against adopting online voting. But is there a fundamental difference in the way that academics and entrepreneurs approach the risks and benefits of online voting? How might the introduction of online voting change the way that we conduct American elections? Sponsored by: SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. They also have a feature called BlackHole where you can relegate a sender’s messages to obscurity. For Predicting Our Future listeners, visit sanebox.com/future and receive an extra $25 credit on top of their two-week free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt An Exercise In Frustration: Testimony Before Congress Dan Wallach is a Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. On September 13, 2016, he testified before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for a hearing entitled “Protecting the 2016 Elections from Cyber and Voting Machine Attacks.” Dan Wallach: “My main message for you here today is that our election systems face credible cyber-threats from our nation-state adversaries, and it’s prudent to adopt contingency plans before November to mitigate these threats.” Professor Wallach is one of the nation’s foremost experts in researching electronic voting systems. During his testimony, he addressed the real concerns posed by Russian hacking of DNC emails, and also pinpointed where hacking might occur in the presidential election that, at that time, was less than two months away. Dan Wallach: “I believe my top concern is the voter registration systems because they are generally online. If it’s online, it’s accessible from the internet, and if it’s accessible from the internet, it’s accessible from our nation-state adversaries. . . . If you can selectively or entirely delete people who you’d rather not vote, the current provisional voting system can’t really scale to support a large number of voters who are filling out affidavits and following that process." Dan suggested we invest more in computer backups and be prepared to restore data from those backups if the original voter registration lists became compromised or corrupted. He also identified a second area of vulnerability around whether our adversaries can get malware into our electronic voting machines. His solution? We must replace our aging electronic voting machines with either “next-generation” optical scan systems or new touchscreen systems, both of which would have paper trails for subsequent auditing if there were allegations of fraud or tampering so that it’s much more difficult for outside actors to manipulate them. Dan is not a fan of the electronic voting machines we use in our elections, but at the time of the hearing where replacing the machines was not an option, his recommendation to Congress was for aggressive contingency planning in case it became evident that the machines were tampered with or disabled. The Biggest Risks To American Democracy While a day doesn’t go by without a news story about Russian influence on the election, Dan Wallach’s worst fears about a direct hacking of the election seem to have gone unrealized. Experts generally agree that the votes cast weren’t tampered with and that Donald Trump, while losing the popular vote, did in fact win the Electoral College, and was rightfully inaugurated in January as the 45th President of the United St...

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