Interviews with government officials, analysts, and tech experts reveal severe vulnerabilities in many levels of the US election system, ahead of midterms
An investigation into the US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level. Tweets: @selectedwisdom , @fawfulfan , @ezraklein , @ezraklein , @ezraklein , and @dangillmor Tweets: Clint Watts / @selectedwisdom : The biggest concern on Election Day should be someone, anyone, foreign or domestic, hacks a voting machine or voter rolls & whether truly successful or not, will incite panic that vote isn't legitimate - particularly when partisan officials amplify these conspiracies http://twitter.com/... Matthew Chapman / @fawfulfan : Electronic voting machines should be abolished. Scrap them all. It wouldn't completely solve the problem, but it would definitely help — and as a bonus it would reduce lines at polling places. http://twitter.com/... Ezra Klein / @ezraklein : We spent 6 months talking to more than 100 people involved in administering, securing, or analyzing the safety of American elections. Their verdict: our elections are not safe, and hackers are getting more sophisticated and more determined. https://www.vox.com/... Ezra Klein / @ezraklein : “A recent study by ProPublica found that among the election offices overseeing 40 congressional toss-up races, only a third used two-factor authentication to secure their passwords.” https://www.vox.com/... Ezra Klein / @ezraklein : This is one of the scariest passages I've read in recent memory. https://www.vox.com/... pic.twitter.com/OlJ92p0ZwT Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : Another excellent story on the grotesque — and possibly deliberate — lack of security in our voting systems. http://www.vox.com/... Also a story that is at least 2 years late to even being to make a difference.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Vox investigation lands a month before the midterms, and its interviews confirm what prior reporting had already established: two years after hackers penetrated voter-registration networks in multiple states, the underlying infrastructure remains largely unchanged despite officials' warnings. The piece's central finding, per Ezra Klein's interviewees, is that American elections are not safe and attackers are growing more sophisticated.
The vendor layer looks no better than the government layer. Researchers had already caught [[a:944654|ES&S systems in ten states connected to the internet despite the company's claims otherwise]], and security experts say the dominant election-tech companies have failed to acknowledge or remedy known vulnerabilities — so the article's alarm rests on documented gaps, not hypotheticals.
First-order effects
- Election officials running close races head into Election Day with a confidence problem rather than just a security problem: Clint Watts warns that even an unsuccessful hack of voting machines or voter rolls could incite panic that results aren't legitimate, especially when partisan officials amplify the claim.
Second-order effects
- The findings put direct pressure on dominant vendors like ES&S, whose internet-connected systems were exposed by researchers, and strengthen Matthew Chapman's argument for abolishing electronic voting machines outright — turning vendor claims about air-gapped systems into a liability rather than a selling point.
Third-order effects
- If attacks keep targeting perception instead of vote counts — as later incidents like the rural Texas county malware campaign that sent fake emails to voters demonstrated — every contested result becomes contestable regardless of whether ballots were actually altered, pushing toward structural fixes like paper trails and federal standards that the market's incumbent vendors have resisted.
The trend: US election security is shifting from a technical patching problem to a legitimacy problem, where undermining confidence in results matters more to attackers than changing them.