Voting Worries, Real and Otherwise by tristero

• Tech and politics: Brian Barrett has a must-read piece in Wired about how America's electronic voting machines could be hacked this November. Three-quarters of the country votes via paper ballots, he notes and only five (DE, GA, LA, SC and NJ) rely exclusively on "direct recording electronic" machines, while others do so partially, like Pennsylvania. Not every state has a provision for conducting a post-election audit to insure confidence in the results, though three that could be swing states—FL, OH and PA—do have relatively strong audit rules on the books.
• As security analyst Bruce Schneier pointed out last week in the Washington Post, Russian hackers could disrupt the election not only by interfering with electronic voting machines, but also by deleting voter records, among other tactics.
• Given that a national voter file with 191 million individual records on it appeared online last December, security experts worry that it would not be difficult for hackers to target state-level voter records to selectively purge people.
• So, while Republican ignominee Donald Trump has started at Sao that the November election might be "rigged" against him, an unprecedented charge that may undermine confidence in the results, there's also reason to fear that it might be disrupted from abroad.