What can we do?
Touchscreen voting machines must be retired immediately. Fifteen states still used touchscreen voting machines in 2016. Virginia retired theirs, but key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia may still be using them in 2020, leaving them easy targets for hackers.
States that use computerized ballot scanners like New York must change to verify the computer vote count by hand counting the ballots. Risk limiting audits (RLA) are the gold standard for audits of election, but they require funding and training and take time to implement. We need changes to recount laws now, before the crucial November elections. If an election is close, or if a candidate requests it, 100% of the ballots must be publicly hand-counted.
Changes don't require huge federal or even state actions. Counties can adopt close-vote hand count legislation and local Boards Of Elections can hand count on their own initiative. In Columbia County, New York, the 3% audit meant only one ballot box in the whole county would be examined. The two election commissioners there felt they could not in good conscience certify elections which were essentially not audited, so Columbia voluntarily hand counts all the ballots in every race. They are the only county in New York to do so, but any county Board of Elections can follow their principled example.
In 2016, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein attempted to find out how people actually voted in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Unlike New York, those states had paths for any candidate on the ballot to get full hand counts. Unfortunately, Stein's attempts to get recounts in those three states were all blocked by partisan maneuvering and Democratic indifference. Michigan blocked the counting of 75,000 votes from Detroit. Trump won Michigan by only 10,704 votes.
We are living in perilous times. If even the secretive National Security Agency with all its resources was hacked and its hacking tools stolen, it is delusional to think that cyber-security efforts by any state's Board of Elections can protect our vote count against hacking.
To protect our democracy, we must recount all the votes in close races through automatic hand counts of all the ballots. Every candidate on the ballot must have the right to a recount of his or her race. Only then can we be sure that Russians or someone else did not hack our vote count.
References:
Video 4 minutes: I Hacked an Election. So Can the Russians
https://www.verifiedvoting.org/ Database of state election laws
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-hacker-proof-voting-machine.html
The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine 2.21.2018
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