The study, which studied official state voter record websites, determined that in 35 states plus the District of Columbia, voter registration websites support users to log on and modify information such as home addresses, party alliance, and gender. While this gives a convenient way for voters to update their enrollment information, it also gives malicious actors an easy way to represent voters and submit address changes, delete voter registrations, or ask absentee ballots. With a simple swap of address, hackers could even designate voters to an entirely separate precinct.
Later on, when the voter presents up to the polls on election day, he or she may be incapable to cast a ballot because the name or address on their ID doesn’t resemble the state’s records, or because poll workers think the voter has conferred up to vote in the wrong precinct. Voters may be utilized away from the polls or asked to file provisional ballots but sometimes those ballots aren’t even included, said the study’s co-author Latanya Sweeney, Professor of Government and Technology at Harvard University.
The fear is that this vulnerability could be used both to undermine confidence in elections and discourage voter turnout, or even to swing the results in favor of a particular candidate.
“If the goal is to ruin any belief in the electoral system, then they force very well want to target a distinct community at large…because that could cause a kind of hysteria,” Sweeney said. “People will say what sort of system is this? We didn’t get a turn to vote, our whole community didn’t get a chance to vote.”
This appears to be precisely what happened in Riverside County, California’s principal election in June 2016, when a lot of voters had their party affiliations changed without their knowledge or consent. According to a report by News, “the changes had been made by hackers who had used secret information, like Social Security or driver’s-license numbers, to obtain the central voter-registration database for the entire state of California.”
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