Russians will be back

Let’s put aside for a moment the question of whether anyone connected to President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in its attempts to hack the 2016 election. Let’s not get into an argument about whether the effort changed any votes, not to speak of the outcome. Let’s not even worry about whether Vladimir Putin himself was involved. The fact is, the hacking was massive, sophisticated and far more widespread than previously thought. According to a new report from Bloomberg, hackers broke into the election systems in 39 states. They may not have succeeded this time in breaching the voting machines themselves or even in substantially disrupting the voter registration rolls. But next time, they could.

We see enough distrust of the system every time some polling places open late because not enough judges show up; imagine that multiplied thousands of times across the country in the next presidential election, with hourslong lines at the polls and voters turned away in state after state. Hackers wouldn’t need to actually change votes to influence the outcome. Doubt about the validity of the outcome would be enough to suit the Kremlin’s goals of undermining the West.

The details that have emerged so far about the Russian effort underscore how difficult our election system is to secure. Hackers reportedly targeted employees of voting system vendors by sending them fraudulent emails designed to get them to provide their passwords. They used the information they gained through those efforts to target election officials themselves with deceptively realistic fake communications. Thousands of people work on our election systems, either as public employees or contractors; it only takes security mistakes by a few of them to provide opportunities for serious mischief.

Adopting balloting systems with voter-verified paper trails is a good first step, though one that hasn’t been universally adopted. Maryland conducted a variety of post-election audits this year, though that didn’t satisfy some critics because the audits relied on reviews of the scanned images of ballots rather than the actual paper copies. Elsewhere — notably, the electorally crucial states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — the effort to audit became a politically charged exercise. Such mechanisms need to be automatic and not dependent on a candidate requesting or funding them.

When reports of Russian hacking efforts first surfaced last summer, New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice issued a report on vulnerabilities of our voting systems, noting that voting machines across the country were outdated, leaving them prone to errors, if not hacking, and that lax procedures left many state or local voter registration systems at risk. The former problem can be solved through greater federal investment in supporting voting machine hardware purchases at the state and local levels.

What we absolutely do not need is a president who dismisses the entire question as sour grapes and excuse-making by Democrats.