As lingering drama in Georgia and Florida demonstrates — along with ongoing suspicion of foreign influence in the 2016 balloting — election integrity is essential to American democracy. The public must have faith that voting systems are secure and that every legally cast ballot will be duly counted.
So it is important to examine Washington’s elections and make sure the voices of the people are being heard. A recent report by McClatchy news service points out some shortcomings in the state’s election security, but those holes appear to require tweaks rather than an overhaul.
Cybersecurity experts found that, in order to change registration information online, Washington voters submit a driver’s license number and the date that license was issued. If hackers were able to obtain a driver’s license number, which McClatchy reports is “easily obtainable” online, they could make some educated guesses to find the date of issue. That would provide access to voter information that could result in a voter being removed from the rolls or having their registration altered.
That might sound like a lot of work, but as Matthew Bernhard, a doctoral student in computer sciences who worked with McClatchy on the project, said, “The kind of adversary we’re talking about is a nation state, where they have a roomful of people who could sit there and click through these messages to try to have a winning combination of data.”
In other words, the risk to elections in this digital age is never-ending, and Washington officials have tried to stay a step ahead of the bad actors. Erich Ebel, a spokesman for Secretary of State Kim Wyman, said: “Our firewalls are state-of-the-art, and we have a number of other measures in place to identify, block and report suspicious activity.”
Washington’s “MyVote” website allows voters to check their registration to make sure it is up to date and has not been altered. And, most important, the state’s use of mail-in ballots for all elections has proven to be a case where old technology is superior to newfangled digital contraptions.
Paper ballots, as experts have noted, cannot be hacked. They provide hard proof of how a citizen cast their vote and allow for relatively easy recounts. That is preferable to states that use electronic voting machines, where there have been claims of votes being switched and where some polling places were provided with inoperable machines. Another feature of vote-by-mail is the fact that Washington voters do not have to stand in line for hours to perform their civic duty.
Overall, Washington is well-fortified for attacks upon its election system. County tabulation machines are not connected to the internet, preventing hacking of actual results, and the state has been recognized as a national leader for its registration and voting procedures. By comparison, a cybersecurity expert said of Georgia’s election system, “A high school student today would get an F if they made that kind of a project.”
But this is no time for Washington officials to rest on their laurels. Election integrity is a continuing issue that threatens to undermine confidence in our democracy and leads to politically motivated charges of nefarious activity. Wyman’s office has formed security partnerships with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI in order maintain that confidence.
We hope that continues. Our democracy depends on it.
