Defending the 2020 Election against Hacking: 5 Questions Answered

Furthermore, previous reports mostly said that the systems had been penetrated. Woodward is saying that malware was installed on these machines. I am not sure whether I should interpret his use of terms in their narrow technical sense, but there is a significant difference between penetration, as in “they got the password to your system, broke in and looked around,” and installing malware, as in “they got in and made technical changes to the operation of your system.”

The latter is far more serious because voters could have been removed from registration rolls and therefore prevented from casting ballots, and that’s what I gather Woodward is describing.

3. How have attempts to hack U.S. election systems changed since 2016?
I do not have inside knowledge of what’s going on now, but my impression is that the Russians are getting more subtle. The basic Russian tactics of four years ago were only moderately subtle. Dumping all the stolen Democratic National Committee files on Wikileaks wasn’t subtle, but some of the narrowcasting of targeted misinformation on social media was brilliant, if utterly evil. For example, using Facebook, Russian propagandists were able to target prospective voters in swing states with disinformation tailored for them.

My impression is that they’re getting better at disinformation campaigns. I think it’s safe to assume that they’re also getting better at digging into the actual machinery of elections.

4. Have efforts to defend U.S. election systems against hackers improved?
On the social media front, there has certainly been improvement. The obvious “sock puppet farms,” large numbers of fake accounts controlled by a single entity, that Russia was running on U.S. social media are far more difficult to run these days because of the way the social media companies are cracking down. What I fear is that the country is defending against the attacks of four years ago while not really knowing about the attacks of today.

In the world of actual election machinery, the U.S. has made a little progress, but COVID-19 has thrown a monkey wrench in the system, forcing a massive shift to postal ballots in states that permit this. That means that attacks on polling-place machinery will be generally less effective than in the past, while attacks on county election offices remain a real threat.

5. What keeps you awake at night going into the 2020 presidential election?
Oh dear. The list is long. Everything from crazies on the loony fringe of American politics shooting at each other in response to election results they don’t like, to people living in such closed media bubbles that we are effectively two different cultures living next door to each other while believing entirely different things about the world we live in.

Between those extremes, consider the possibility of results appearing to be reversed after polls have closed. If there is a demographic split between the vote-in-person crowd and the vote-by-mail crowd, election night results could go one way, while in states like Iowa, where postal ballots received six days after the election get counted if there is proof they were mailed on time, the final results could go another way.

Then, add in the possibility of hacked central tabulating software in key counties, and there’s plenty to lose sleep over.

Douglas W. Jones is Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Iowa. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.