You Know What You Can’t Hack? Paper.

To quickly address threats to the integrity of our electoral process, the US needs to stop using electronic voting.

Erik Brattberg and Tim Maurer’s May 2018 paper on Europe’s counter to fake news and cyber attacks highlights a very clear trend: when you’re worried about someone crawling through digital networks and tampering with your election results, paper ballots are the way to go.

“Electronic voting was banned in the Netherlands in 2007 to ensure the public’s trust in the democratic process,” they wrote, and France banned electronic voting back in 2012. The United Kingdom never allowed it in the first place. (Some American states have taken steps in this direction, prohibiting the use of electronic voting on their own, but the use of electronic voting, as well as electronic tallying, still remains widespread.)

Brattberg and Maurer’s work is important, comprehensive, and worth a read, but the pair hardly stand alone in their assertion.

Just a few days ago, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that “no Internet technology is safe, secure or reliable for voting.” Wrote committee co-chairs Lee Bollinger and Michael McRobbie, “we must prevent bad actors from corrupting our electoral process while delivering the means to provide suffrage to an electorate that is growing in size and complexity.” In August, Bloomberg ran an article in line with many others before it — asserting the national security risk posed by electronic voting machines (EVMs). The piece was full of quotes from cybersecurity and intelligence experts who worry about the integrity of not just the 2018 US midterms, but of democratic elections around the globe. And there are dozens and dozens of others you can find with a simple search.

After all, the security of electronic voting machines is terrible — in some cases, virtually nonexistent. Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, recently posted a viral video in which she hacked a voting machine in under two minutes. At DEFCON 2018, the same event from which Tobac filmed her video, an 11 year-old hacker broke into a voting machine in under 10 minutes. The Russian government has already broken into US voting systems and stolen information on half a million American voters. Need I say more?

The broader conversation about electronic voting is not without ethical questions: for instance, the international implications of the “developed” world abandoning forms of electronic voting as “developing” countries often, still, view electronic voting as a “silver bullet” for their electoral problems. Indeed, the myth of inherently democratic technology prevails; the impacts of electronic voting are different in every country, and this disparate effectiveness is certainly something to study in greater depth. (I would also include in this discussion the double-standard employed by many world leaders who complain about election interference — but only in their country.)

Using paper ballots is by no means the only way, the only step, to defend democratic elections against digital interference — fake news and, more broadly, mass social engineering still pose large if not existential threats to democratic societies and free, open, genuine discourse. Much work needs to be done. But the 2018 US midterms are approaching, and we need to rapidly secure our election systems. Resorting to paper ballots and manual tabulation is a necessary step in that direction.