Experts Outline a Plan to Prevent Election Cyberattacks

Wednesday morning both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees held hearings on cyberattacks of the 2016 presidential election. The House Intelligence Committee received testimony from former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. The Senate Intelligence Committee hosted a panel of experts, among them J. Alex Halderman, a professor and Director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan.

Halderman, in addition to his verbal and written testimony to the Committee, published an op-ed in the Washington Post today. In it, he presented the broad outlines of a proposal from the National Election Defence Coalition that "lays out an actionable plan for safeguarding the vote".

The proposal has 103 signatories, including "tea party Republicans and progressive Democrats, academic computer scientists and corporate security officials — all united in the view that our nation’s rough patchwork of voting security measures is wholly inadequate."

The signers hope to provide a concrete roadmap for Congress to develop a straightforward policy to standardize and protect state electoral systems. Halderman outlines their three basic tenets:

• Congress should provide time-sensitive matching funds to states to upgrade voting technologies, while ensuring paper records of all votes that can’t be hacked.

• Congress should call on states to conduct risk-limiting audits for every federal race, by inspecting enough of the paper ballots to tell whether the computer results are accurate.

• Congress should instruct federal agencies to partner with states to conduct serious and comprehensive threat assessment, and to identify and apply best practices in cybersecurity from across sectors to the design of voting equipment and the management of federal elections.

Halderman provides a brief history of attempts to document and address the issue of election security, but argues that now the bipartisan will may finally exist to get something accomplished. It wouldn’t, he argues, even be that expensive, comparatively. New analysis suggests that replacement of insecure paperless voting systems could be accomplished for $130 - $400 million, and instituting risk-limiting audits nationally would cost approximately $20 million annually.

Compared to the entirety of the "administration’s $640 billion defense budget request" those figures barely equate to a “rounding error”, he says. Congress may not even need to foot most of the bill, since many states and counties are eager to make necessary tech upgrades.

Should Congress develop policy to encourage and support the states in standardizing election systems in order to protect from future cyberattacks? Use the Take Action button to tell your reps what you think!

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— Asha Sanaker

(Photo Credit: Pexels.com / Creative Commons)