Interviews with government officials, analysts, and tech experts reveal severe vulnerabilities in many levels of the US election system, ahead of midterms
and as a bonus it would reduce lines at polling places. http://twitter.com/... 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
A month before the 2018 midterms, Vox's reporting aggregates warnings that were already on the record: a New York Times investigation found that two years after hackers penetrated many voter-registration networks, voting infrastructure remained largely unchanged despite officials' warnings. Dan Gillmor amplified the piece while noting it arrived at least two years late to make a difference before the vote.
The reporting lands against a market structure the coverage has documented repeatedly: security experts say the companies dominating US election tech have failed to acknowledge or remedy vulnerabilities, and researchers later found dozens of ES&S systems online in ten states despite the vendor's claim its machines are never internet-connected.
First-order effects
- County and state election officials head into the midterm with documented weaknesses across registration databases, voting machines, and vendor software — and with remediation timelines too short to change anything before ballots are cast.
- Vendors like ES&S face immediate reputational exposure, since researchers' findings directly contradict public claims that election systems are never connected to the internet.
Second-order effects
- Adversaries shift toward cheaper indirect channels rather than machine tampering — the pattern later visible when malware on a rural Texas county's email system sent fake emails to voters, exploiting the human layer instead of voting hardware.
- Federal and state authorities inherit pressure to fund replacements and audits, because the incumbent vendors' refusal to acknowledge flaws leaves procurement as the only lever officials control.
Third-order effects
- If the vendor-dominated market keeps shipping unpatched systems, the structural fix moves toward federal standards, certification requirements, and paper-trail mandates — shifting election integrity from local IT decisions to national policy.
- The gap between 2016's intrusion of voter-registration networks and unchanged infrastructure by 2018 — with responses still judged inadequate heading into 2020 as Russian tactics evolve — points to election security becoming a permanent, recurring political battleground rather than a one-cycle fix.
The trend: US election security is settling into a cycle where documented vulnerabilities outpace remediation, pushing each successive contest toward attacks on the information layer around voting rather than the machines themselves.