ARGUMENT: ELECTION SECURITYHow the Midterms Could Weaken U.S. Election Security

Candidates who support former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election would, if elected in November, gain the power to open up access to their states’ voting machines.

Eric Geller writes in Politico that this is a prospect which election security experts and cybersecurity analysts describe as potentially catastrophic for American democracy.

Geller notes that unvetted and uncertified outsiders have already examined voting equipment or inspected the devices’ sensitive computer code, bypassing or ignoring longstanding security protections. These so-called audits by Trump supporters have already compromised machines in Maricopa County, Ariz.; Mesa County, and Elbert County, Colo.; Coffee County, Ga.; several counties and townships in Michigan; and Fulton County, Pa.

In some of these jurisdictions, Trump-aligned attorneys such as Sidney Powell, and Trump allies overseeing local elections, have taken the code powering voting machines and shared it with conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists, as the Washington Post reports.

Now Republicans who embrace the former president’s lies and conspiracy theories “are running for governor or secretary of state, offices that would give them even broader authority to allow like-minded activists and consulting firms to conduct so-called ‘audits’ of the entire voting systems in key states,” Geller writes, adding:

These kinds of examinations would make it easier for hackers intent on sowing chaos or changing the outcomes of future elections to learn how to conduct their attacks, according to voting security professionals, who note that some sensitive information about voting machines has already been leaked since Trump supporters began their push for audits.

It’s “an absolutely terrifying prospect,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer security expert and professor at the University of Michigan who has repeatedly exposed flaws in voting systems but has also debunked Trump’s claims about 2020 fraud.

Bloomberg reports that election deniers have been chosen as GOP gubernatorial nominees in Arizona, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; secretary of state nominees in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming; attorney general nominees in Arizona, Kansas, Maryland and Michigan; U.S. senator nominees in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Oregon; and U.S. House nominees in at least 20 states.

Geller writes:

Voting system hacks could take many forms, cybersecurity experts say. Malware planted on voting machines could cause them to flip votes or simply freeze up during an election. Malicious code could also corrupt the election management systems used to program the machines before each contest.

And breaches in just a few states can endanger security across the country because of how widely used a few models are: Just six voting machine models are used in more than 300 counties each, according to a Politico analysis of data from the nonprofit election integrity group Verified Voting. Six models of scanners that tally votes from paper ballots are equally popular.

Geller writes that now, conspiracy theorists are gaining access to these devices and copying, sharing and leaking data about how they work, which could make it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities and exploit them.

“The risks have created logistical nightmares for election officials,” he writes.

Few election workers are sufficiently technically savvy to spot sabotage, security experts said. “It probably would take very little sleight of hand to make it look like you’re just copying data but actually be tampering with the system,” Halderman told Geller.

There is another worrisome possibility. By giving unvetted outsiders access to voting machines, Trump supporters could unwittingly enable more sophisticated sabotage. Will Adler, a senior election technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit digital policy research group, told Geller that foreign spies might plant operatives inside the groups that get access to voting machines to steal information or tamper with their devices.