Hacking Votes, Hacking Minds: Assessing Technological Vulnerabilities in United States Elections

Abstract

Foreign countries have been attempting to interfere in elections in the United States since America’s inception. Advances in technology have made this interference easier than ever before. Investigating how and in what ways the United States’ election system is vulnerable to technological manipulation is the focus of this thesis. Henceforth, I examine three methods of technological attack on the United States’ election process: using technology to manipulate vote totals on election days, spreading fake news, and waging information warfare campaigns. I show that the United States is extremely vulnerable to all three types of manipulations, and that many of these problems were evident in the 2016 election. In investigating election technology, it is clear that both the voting technology used on Election Day and the voter registration databases American voting precincts rely on to run their elections can be easily penetrated; both types of systems were probed by cyber attackers, and voter registration systems in some states were in fact compromised during the election cycle. In regards to the second threat, it was established that fake news is a serious threat to democracy and that it is more spreadable than ever before in history due to new technologies; this idea was in full view throughout the 2016 election, as fake news was viewed by millions of Americans and framed many of the events the media covered, influencing how citizens thought of the candidates in the 2016 election. Lastly, similar to technological innovation’s capacity to make fake news more spreadable than ever before, information warfare campaigns are currently more potent than ever before in history. In 2016, Russia conducted an elaborate successful information war on the United States’ election that will likely be mimicked in future elections. While debating the best policy solutions to the vulnerabilities proposed was not the focus of this paper, in the concluding chapter, I offer suggestions that naturally flow from this thesis to address the impact of the problems outlined. These suggestions are offered both as a guide for future research and a call to our academic, political and civic communities to engage in finding solutions to the dangerous threat that technological warfare poses to our democracy.