Despite Hacking Fears, Election Day Has a Mostly Smooth Start

Despite Hacking Fears, Election Day Has a Mostly Smooth Start

Russia's meddling in the 2016 United States presidential campaign season and election sparked an unprecedented push to secure election infrastructure. The effort was imperfect, and states are still dogged by a lack of federal election funding, but a relatively smooth Election Day thus far indicates that many of those security, integrity, and reliability initiatives have paid off.


Yes, Tuesday has seen its share of problems, including electronic pollbook failures in Franklin County, OH and voting machine outages in Spalding County, Georgia. In both cases, though, officials were able to keep voting going by switching to paper pollbooks and manually processing paper ballots. Both local election officials, researchers, and the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said on Tuesday that such snafus are inevitable in every election and don't indicate anything nefarious.


"We are seeing historic levels of cooperation among federal agencies and state and local election officials to secure this election and to adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic," says Mark Lindeman, acting codirector of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes election system integrity. "All this work has borne fruit. So far, the problem reports we are seeing are on par with past elections—a tremendous accomplishment amidst harrowing challenges."

With hours still to go until the last polls close, no one wants to jinx anything. And officials warn in particular that there could still be election-related website outages or other digital system disruptions as ..

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