The United States' effort to move toward electronic balloting is being brought into question over a series of data breaches overseas,
The Hill reports.
These breaches are increasing worries that hackers could create election fraud in the U.S., especially as a growing number of voters are using the internet to request mail-in ballots.
In the past half year, the data of hundreds of millions of voters in several countries, including the U.S., have been discovered on the internet in unprotected form.
A glaring example is in the Philippines, where elections will be held next week. Officials there said the personal information of all 55 million registered voters was hacked. The Commission on Elections in Manila insists, however, that the computerized vote will be conducted on a different server than the one that was penetrated, and that the poll will fair, AP reports.
But the ability to wreak havoc is not restricted to overseas, experts say, as few standards exists for securing voter data in the U.S. as well.
Electronic voting expert Dr. Joseph Kiniry said that test runs have proven that internet voting experiments in the U.S. can have disastrous results as well.
"If you can go in there and delete rows based on someone's name or political affiliation, we will have a massively screwed up election process on the day," he said.
The Help America Vote Act was passed by Congress in 2002, which required each state to develop a uniform computerized statewide voter registration database. Although this had its benefits, experts say there has been no guarantee of adequate standards for protection.
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