Electronic voting seems to be one of the most intuitive results of the age of technology. As technology becomes more advanced and more embedded into everyday household items, the move to electronic versions of historically paper activities becomes more expected and more desired. Electronic voting is the perfect candidate. The push for electronic voting, and other things like this, stems from the same reasoning in favor of converting paper to electronic databases: easier to use, less risk, ubiquity.
However, I do not thing that electronic voting is as safe as it was intended to be. Technology is as advanced as it ever has been before, just as the hacking and cracking skills of both the benevolent and malevolent programmers out there. The combination of those two creates a completely unsafe environment for almost everything that is stored in the cloud or even local systems. On top of all of this, society has become extremely aggressively opinionated, adding on to the heat of the current presidential election, making me feel as though our systems are even more susceptible to being hacked and our data being stolen (have I ever mentioned I am not a fan of IoT?).
The extremist-like aggression of voters caused by two media-described-psychotic candidates makes rigging an election nearly a reality. The systems are not safe. Even if they were nearly secured, it's the type of people that have been brought to the extremities of their ideals this election year that will find the vulnerabilities. And I think it's important to look at these edge cases, because a hack can be thrown together by only a single person.
So, I do not completely trust this coming election. Not only is it plausible for the election to be rigged, but the candidates are also powerful enough and power-hungry enough to make it happen tenfold. But the thing is, just like every topic discussed in our class, this situtation is not black and white. There needs to be some compromise. There is no perfect solution. What is my solution, however? Maybe the US political system should have let Bernie Sanders take the presidency like God intended.
After California declared almost all of the electronic voting machines in the state unfit for use in 2007 for failing basic security tests, San Diego County put its decertified machines in storage. It has been paying the bill to warehouse them ever since: No one wants to buy them, and county rules prohibit throwing millions of dollars’ worth of machines in the trash bin.
This muddle is about to collide head-on with one of the most incendiary presidential campaigns in modern U.S. history, one in which the candidates have already questioned whether votes will be counted properly.
The concept of voting machine hacking is going to be on people’s minds. Though it’s (probably) never happened, it is theoretically possible, and that’s scary. Should people worry about their votes being stolen by hackers? (Donald Trump thinks so.)
Hackers told CBS News that problems with electronic voting machines have been around for years. The machines and the software are old and antiquated. But now with millions heading to the polls in three months, security experts are sounding the alarmHackers told CBS News that problems with electronic voting machines have been around for years. The machines and the software are old and antiquated. But now with millions heading to the polls in three months, security experts are sounding the alarm