Election Cybersecurity Progress Report: Will the U.S. be ready for 2020? [video]

> at least partly by someone's design

By design, yes, by intent, probably not. For eample, the federal government is, like many very large organizations, absolutely awful at writing contracts for things outside of their area of expertise. See the ACA marketplace website fiasco, for example; while I haven't personally read the contracts, the word on the street is they were written in such a way that there wasn't a responsible party for making sure that the thing actually worked- i.e. that different vendors systems interoperated well (then again, maybe that's just urban legend, I'm not a bureaucrat in DC).

Add on top of that the extensive layers of red tape to even become a vendor for the government, and add on top of THAT the fact that elections in the US are heavily decentralized, so you've got many different governments with many different systems with many different requirements, all of whom have substantial roadblocks set up and lack the expertise to properly audit vendors, and it's practically guaranteed to not be pulled off well.

My response to the headline would have been a version of President Obama's campaign posters: "Nope!"

You can trace the money behind these vendors back to both parties, too.

>I question if the insecurity of our elections isn't at least partly by someone's design

Yeah, with some of the process, policy, and technical decisions that have been made, it's really the only logical conclusion.

" if the insecurity of our elections isn't at least partly by someone's design."

For a lot of hyperpartisans it's only about winning. They don't care about fair elections.

> Did you know that only 27000 votes being different (in the right states) in 2016 could have changed the election result?

Apparently the Democrat candidate didn't know that in 2016. They campaigned in California even had a few rallies there but forgot about Wisconsin. Some might argue the Russians hacked her agenda to divert her plane away :-)

One a serious note, it seems candidates knowing the fact, and using their resources wisely, means they would stop their effort in a state once they can be reasonably sure they'd get enough votes. So in general, I imagine it might not be that uncommon to see small differences.

Another way to put it, a small spread in one state could be a random coin flip. But a lot of random coin flips (multiple states) landing on heads, starts to look less random.

The world and [insert field] is just in the last several years waking up to the reality of cybersecurity. Few people or sectors are prepared and yes that needs to be addressed. The title and operating assumption deserve this retort. A previous reply points out the lack of evidence that the DNC was 'hacked' by 'Russia' and not a disaffected member of the party. I'm trying to stick to the topic of cybersecurity, though I fear the OP is not. I suppose the matrix of opinion editorials and propaganda fit somewhere in the scope of security, so I'll leave it there.