Donald Trump said this week that he fears the election will be “rigged” for Hillary Clinton. Although he didn’t specify exactly how Clinton, her team, or her supporters would commit widespread voter fraud, allowing her to steal a Presidential election, he insisted that the 2012 Presidential election demonstrated a cause for significant concern.
I’ve been hearing about it for a long time,” Trump told CNN. “And I know last time, there were — you had precincts where there was practically nobody voting for the Republican. And I think that’s wrong. I think that was unfair, frankly.”
Many of Trump’s supporters agree?
But how easy is it to actually rig an election? It turns out that while voting machines are notoriously easy to hack, throwing a national election is a major operation that would require serious technical firepower.
In a recent CBS News report, hackers demonstrated that individual electronic voting machines — the kind used in most precincts — are particularly vulnerable.
The machines and software, according to security experts, are antiquated, and security protections are scarce. In the time since most constituencies purchased their electronic voting machines, technology has markedly improved, allowing a hacker with a $20 device access to much of the machine’s software.
Hacking electronic vote-counting machines is easy as well. Security experts told CBS that data on vote-counting machines isn’t encrypted, and hackers could intercept voting data as it passes from the machine to the central counting location.
Some Internet hacking experts have even expressed concern that it’s possible to reconfigure an entire voting system to count single votes twice, or to count single votes as fractions of votes, making counts unreliable.
But to make a big impact, hackers would have to take over more than 9,000 separate voting locations, making it almost impossible to “hack the vote,” without someone noticing. And that’s only if every voting district is fully electronic; most voting districts use a mix of paper ballots, electronic ballots, electronic counting, and provisional or hand balloting.
America also happens to be one place in the world where data analysts scrupulously hoard voter information, so illogical or inconsistent voter shifts are easier to identify.
As for whether Clinton has the kind of sway over the hacker community she’d need to complicate the Presidential election, well, they’re friendlier to her cause than expected, though mostly because Donald Trump’s comments about Russian hackers make them nervous.
