But with all the issues the election needs an audit
Hacked or Not, Audit This Election (And All Future Ones)
AFTER AN ELECTION marred by hacker intrusions that breached the Democratic National Committee and the email account of one of Hillary Clinton’s top staffers, Americans are all too ready to believe that their actual votes have been hacked, too. Now those fears have been stoked by a team of security experts, who argue that voting machine vulnerabilities mean Clinton should demand recounts in key states.
Dig into their argument, however, and it’s less alarmist than it might appear. If anything, it’s practical. There’s no evidence that the outcome of the presidential election was shifted by compromised voting machines. But a statistical audit of electronic voting results in key states as a routine safeguard—not just an emergency measure—would be a surprisingly simple way to ease serious, lingering doubts about America’s much-maligned electoral security. “Auditing ought to be a standard part of the election process,” says Ron Rivest, a cryptographer and computer science professor at MIT. “It ought to be a routine thing as much as a doctor washing his hands.”
Electronic Elections Need Audits
On Wednesday, University of Michigan computer security researcher Alex Halderman published a blog post arguing that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania should perform recounts due to risks that the election was hacked. The article followed a far more sensational report from New York Magazine the evening before stating that Halderman and a team of experts tried to persuade Clinton staffers to request that recount, citing a disparity in Clinton votes between counties that used fully electronic versus paper ballot voting. (Halderman disputed the accuracy of some of NY Mag’s claims, and at no point said there was hard evidence of an actual hack.)
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Election security experts still agree with Halderman’s underlying argument: that auditing elections would help to settle dangerous, persistent uncertainty in a system potentially plagued by hackers. They’re not as taxing as a full recount. And, importantly, they shouldn’t solely be deployed as an emergency provision in contested elections, but rather a default part of the process. MIT’s Rivest quotes his computer scientist colleague at George Washington University, Poorvi Vora: “Brush your teeth. Eat your spinach. Audit your elections.”
https://www.wired.com/2016/11/hacked-not-audit-election-rest/amp/
I support a recount simply for those issues and get rid of those machines. They have been nothing but problematic.
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