SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — The Department of Homeland Security and other cyber-security experts are working on preventing hackers from getting access to electronic voting booths.
In a new tech report from KRON4’s Gabe Slate, voting machines are not connected to the internet so individual voting booths can’t be hacked.
Electronic voting is offered in 31 states, but for the most part online voting is only offered to military personnel serving overseas or Americans living abroad.
According to the federal voter assistance program, roughly only one percent of U.S. voters are eligible to return their ballots by email, web portal or fax machine.
So experts are not worried that hackers can sway this election by changing or deleting votes.
Tony with Avast, a Silicon Valley based cyber security firm, said hackers could disrupt election day with a big internet outage like what happened a few weeks ago when Amazon, Netflix and Twitter went down.
“Take this election with so many undecided voters if you could take down news sites or channels where people are getting their information for voting that could impact the outcome of the vote,” Tony said.
A big internet outage could affect voters if Facebook, Twitter and other social networks go down.
“Imagine if denial of service attack happens on the cellular networks.. Suddenly you can’t use your phone, use gps to find where to vote… how long would people deal with that before giving up?”
Bottom line, do not count on the websites and apps you need for voting this coming Tuesday. Consider preparing now and do the research, figure out your vote and where you will be voting.