Technology is a mainstay and staple of most industries as it provides reliability and efficiency in most functions and settings in the present.
The election and voting procedures are among the most significant events in a nation that can define the future and shape a country. However, the cyber industry notes this poses the most challenging obstacle as threats arise and compromise the integrity of the digital technology currently used.
Digital Ballot casting still proves to be a vulnerable form of voting in the United States as malicious entities pose high-levels of threats to the nation's votes, as election draws near. Bloomberg reports that according to expert, Dmitri Alperovitch, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of CrowdStrike Holdings, paper ballot voting is still the safest and least prone to compromises.
Sunday's Face The Nation on CBS explored more on this issue that invited Alperovitch to share his insights as a cybersecurity expert. He highlighted that in-person voting and paper ballots are safe, ensuring that a person truthfully cast his or her vote.
"Voting is the hardest thing to secure in cybersecurity," says Alperovitch. "And the only way we know how to do it well and safely is by using paper, whether it be mail-in ballots or whether it be voting in person with a paper record that can be produced by the machine or the paper record of a paper ballot that you can mark up. Those are the safest ways."
Digital hacks are apparent nowadays present in all forms of online and technological elements. The digital communities are plagued with the so-called 'hackers' that steal information for their good. In the case of national voting, hackers present a threat directly related to the manipulation of results that favors one electoral candidate over the other.
"Well, paper cannot be hacked, however, there is legitimate concerns about logistics... They'll be able to do the signature verification that is necessary to make sure that there is no fraud. It can be done." according to Alperovitch.
National Election Defense Coalition notes that democratic countries, such as America, should use paper ballot for voting because this is the "state-of-the-art" in public elections.
e-Vote Hacking: a threat to National Security?
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Threats to a person may evolve to a national scale when said hacks target the integrity of a nation by vote manipulation.
"I'm not so much concerned about foreign entities interfering in the paper process... But then there is the influence operations that they're conducting and a number of countries are doing that now, China, Iran, as well as Russia," as stated by Alperovitch to CBS.
International hacks like what happened in 2016 caused by the Russians is possible but Alperovitch stated that it hasn't occurred to this year's elections yet. He believes that currently, there are no threats that pose as to other countries manipulating this year's votes.
Hacking a digital election produces harmful risks and threats to national security for it will change the course of a nation's future. Compromise to elections through digital hacks has the ability to harm a nation's integrity.
