Sue Halpern in The New Yorker:

The fact is that, despite real gains over the past several years in shoring up the security of election systems in a number of states—with increased cybersecurity training for election officials, the introduction of risk-limiting audits, and the elimination of touch-screen voting machines—many of those systems continue to have weaknesses that could leave them open to attack. Some are still connected to the Internet, or encode voters’ choices in bar codes that are unreadable to the human eye, or don’t provide a paper trail. Additionally, not all voter-registration systems are secured behind a firewall or outfitted with monitors that alert administrators to a breach. Electronic poll books, which are used to check a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot, are vulnerable to malware attacks and remote hacking; according to Verified Voting, almost seventy-five per cent of registered voters now live in jurisdictions that use e-poll books. There is little oversight or regulation on e-poll-book companies or on election venders more generally.

To be clear, acknowledging these vulnerabilities is not an admission that they have been exploited to change the outcome of an election. Or, as Jones put it to me, “even if the barn door is unlocked, it doesn’t mean someone went inside and robbed it.” Halderman conducted a twelve-week study of Georgia’s new ballot-marking voting machines, beginning a few months before the November, 2020, election, and uncovered numerous security flaws, such as the potential for a malicious actor to install software that could alter votes. But he has also defended the vender of those machines, Dominion Voting Systems, from spurious claims made by the former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani that the company conspired with Facebook to rig the election for Joe Biden. (In July, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg put Halderman’s report under seal, likely out of fear that it would be used to amplify accusations that the 2020 Presidential election had been stolen. She also denied Dominion access to the report so that the findings would not be disclosed in litigation against the company.)…

The challenge, then, is to have the honest conversation about election security that Senator Wyden talks about. Failing to acknowledge the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our electoral system will not make elections more secure. More crucially, failing to fix them will be a gift to those who have no allegiance to the fundamental principles on which our civic life depends. It may be all the evidence they need to claim that the system is rigged and justify its subversion.