NEDC: WORKING TO TAKE ELECTIONS OFF THE INTERNET FOR 2020.

On February 7, 2020 the Technical Guidelines Development Committee of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) voted unanimously to approve the requirements for the federal voting system standards which includes a ban on wireless and internet connectivity. This was the result of two years of concerted effort at NEDC. Though more was done behind the scenes, here are some of the highlights:

NEDC has worked for the past two years to dispel the myth that “voting machines are never connected to the internet” beginning with our contributions to expose the use of remote access software and wireless modems in voting system in the The New York Times, The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting.

Later in 2018, we published this report, “Email and Internet Voting: the Overlooked Threat to Election Security” with our allies, the Association for Computing Machinery, US Technology Policy Committee, CommonCause and R Street Institute to sound the alarm on online voting and spurred this demonstration hack of an emailed ballot  at the DEF CON Voting Village.

We then organized a letter signed by over 30 computer security and election experts asking the EAC and Department of Homeland Security to address the dangerous use of wireless modems in voting systems.  The letter put a spotlight on this practice and got attention in the press.

All this while we participated actively in the EAC’s Cyber Security Public Working Group for the development of the federal voting system guidelines. We became increasingly concerned that the next version of the guidelines would not ban internet or wireless connectivity because there was significant opposition from some Committee members. We alerted our allies at Public Citizen, the Secure our Votes coalition, Free Speech For People, EPIC, Freedomworks and others to our concerns and asked them to join us in a campaign to generate public comments to the EAC pressing for the guideline to ban connectivity.

With our allies, we crafted and initiated a campaign which generated over 55,000 public comments. We backed this up with more press coverage to expose that fact that voting systems could by mapped and identified on the internet.

Because there was significant push back from some members of the Committee, we kept up the pressure.

We took that to the next level working with our strategic partner organization Free Speech For People to expose the fact that the leading vendor appeared to improperly advertise its voting machines with wireless modems. We asked the EAC to investigate this concern, which was reported by NBC Nightly News.

On Friday we saw the culmination of all of this work when the Committee passed the requirements with a ban on internet connectivity and wireless modems in the federal guidelines. There are still final hurdles to jump, but this is a huge step in the right direction.