70 Scientific American, September 2019 Illustration by Bud Cook
access. In a close election, if a coordinated group, say
in Russia, thinks one candidate is much better than
the other for their country, why not try to influence
the outcome by undetectably manipulating votes?
An attacker could infiltrate what are called election-
management systems. There is a programming pro-
cess by which the design of the ballot—the races and
candidates and the rules for counting the votes—gets
produced and then gets copied to every individual vot-
ing machine. Election officials usually copy it on mem-
ory cards or USB sticks for the election machines.
That provides a route by which malicious code could
spread from the centralized programming system to
many voting machines in the field. Then the attack
code runs on the individual voting machines, and it’s
just another piece of software. It has access to all the
same data that the voting machine does, including all
the electronic records of people’s votes.
For 2020 I think ground zero for this kind of vote
manipulation via cyberattack is an office building
in the Midwest. Much of the country outsources its
ballot design to just a few election vendors—the larg-
est of which is a voting-machine manufacturer that,
when I visited, told me it does the preelection pro-
gramming for about 2,000 jurisdictions across 34
states. All of that’s done from its headquarters, in a
room I’ve been in that I’d describe as being part of a
typical work building shared with other companies. If
attackers can hack into that central facility and
remotely infiltrate the company’s computers, they can
spread malicious code to voting machines and change
election results across much of the country. The tactic
might be as subtle as manipulating vote totals in close
jurisdictions. It could easily go undetected.
The scientific consensus is that the best way to
secure the vote is to use paper ballots and rigorously
audit them, by having people inspect a random sam-
ple. Unfortunately, 12 states still don’t have paper
across the board. And some states, instead of adopting
paper, are now having officials do auditing by looking
at a scan of the original ballot on a computer screen.
We have new research coming out that shows how you
can use a computer algorithm to essentially do “deep
fake” ballot scans. We used computer-vision tech-
niques to automatically move the check marks around
so that the scan of your ballot filled out in your dis-
tinctive handwriting reflects different votes than the
ones you recorded on the piece of paper.
It might actually be scarier if attackers don’t think
one candidate is much better for their purposes than
the other. Maybe their motivation is more general: to
weaken American democracy. They could introduce
malicious code that would make the election equip-
ment essentially destroy itself when it is turned on in
November 2020, which will cause massive chaos. Or
they could have the equipment appear to work, but at
the end of the day officials discover that no votes have
been recorded. In the jurisdictions without paper
backup, there is no other record of the vote. You wouldHOW A DATA JOURNALIST
SEARCHES FOR ANSWERSPeople assume that
because there are data,
that the data must be true.
But the truth is, all data
are dirty. People create data, which means
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Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York
University, as told to Brooke Borellhlh