150,000 Attempts on Election Day to Hack into South Carolina Voter Database

WSJ:

To understand the scale of the hacking attempts against election systems in the 2016 presidential election, consider South Carolina.

On Election Day alone, there were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the state’s voter-registration system, according to a postelection report by the South Carolina State Election Commission.

And South Carolina wasn’t even a competitive state. If hackers were that persistent against a state that President Donald Trump won comfortably, with 54.9% of the vote, it suggests they may have targeted political swing states even more.

As I wrote in my NYT Sunday Review piece:

By 2020, cyberattacks could try to alter or erase voter registration databases, bring down our power grids or transportation infrastructure, or do something else to interfere with actual voting on Election Day. The next hacks could include malicious, false information interspersed with accurate stolen files; public confidence in the fairness of our electoral process could decrease further, even if the hacks are unsuccessful, as incendiary and unsupported claims about voter fraud, cheating and altered vote totals spread via social media.

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