Some Michiganders have already voted by mail-in ballot, but the rest will be queuing up to vote on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3. | stock photo
Some Michiganders have already voted by mail-in ballot, but the rest will be queuing up to vote on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3. | stock photo
The Michigan Election Security Advisory Commission recently released a report examining the possible problems that could crop up on Election Day, even with more than half of the total number of ballots cast in 2016 having already been cast ahead of the 2020 election, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
Potential problems the Commission identified include cyber attacks, software problems and power outages, according to reporting by Bridge Michigan.
“There's no reason to expect that the voting machines today are fundamentally more secure than previous generations used in the U.S., which have been shown to have tremendous vulnerabilities,” Alex Halderman, the Michigan security commission cochair and a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, told Bridge Michigan.
However, some advantages were also enumerated for Michigan in terms of preventing either intentional fraud or accidental problems. Those include the use of hand-marked ballots, thorough auditing procedures and a decentralized voting system involving elections at the city and township level, rather than the county level.
“Michigan actually has a very robust security posture,” Matt Bernhard, a research engineer with Voting Works, a nonprofit voting technology company, told Bridge Michigan. “From a voting machine reliability point of view, I think we're going to be okay.”
As to hacking, there are vulnerabilities, but also a large number of safeguards in place across the state.
“Any machine can be hacked. Most of them take minutes to hack, and nearly all of them can be hacked remotely,” Jake Braun, executive director for the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy’s Cyber Policy Initiative, told Bridge Michigan.
Braun is also the cofounder of the DEF CON Voting Machine Hacking Village, a conference of hackers seeking to expose voting vulnerabilities.
“The concern is that actors will have found some way to put software on tabulators or election management systems or ballot marking devices that could potentially cause votes to be miscounted,” Bernhard said, according to Bridge Michigan.
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