A cyberattack could disrupt Nov 8’s U.S. elections — but wouldn’t change the results

[Commentary] The biggest cyberthreats are voting disruptions, not vote stealing: U.S. history shows that it is possible, but hard, to steal an election. Because the U.S. electoral system is so dispersed and the physical evidence of votes cast is stored redundantly, it’s hard to imagine how widespread vote-stealing or vote-rigging over the Internet would go undetected. To be sure, a cyberattack on the registration or vote-reporting subsystems would be very disruptive. Fail-safe procedures like provisional ballots could seriously inconvenience voters and even disrupt polling places by slowing down voting dramatically. If the U.S. saw widespread cyberattacks, no doubt rumors would fly. And if someone maliciously used social media to spread rumors, that too could be a disruptive cyberthreat.

But simply stealing an election via the Internet would require a lot of effort for little effect. If there’s a cyberattack on the election systems, its goal would be to encourage Americans to doubt the election’s legitimacy. It might temporarily disrupt certain processes, forcing us to wait to find out who won. But it would not change the election’s results.

[Charles Stewart III is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. Merle King is associate professor emeritus of information systems and executive director of the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University.]