OPINION - EDITORIAL

Others say - Election system upgrade needed

The American voting infrastructure may not have been tampered with this time, but experts say outdated systems mean that if someone wanted to attack the next election, they might well get away with it.

Voting machines are aging, and fast. Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002 after confusion caused by paper ballots in the 2000 election, but the electronic systems that states adopted in their place were not built to last longer than 10 or 15 years. A Brennan Center for Justice survey found that 41 states are using systems that are at least a decade old, and officials in 33 states said they need to replace their systems by 2020, but many lack the funds to do so.

But electronic voting systems will always be vulnerable as enemies become more sophisticated. The surest answer would be a law from Congress, similar to the Secure Elections Act currently stalled in the Senate, to mandate that states maintain a voter-verified paper record to pair with any electronic one.

Protecting our elections will not be cheap. It will be worth the cost.

Editorial on 11/13/2018

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