Mail-in and absentee voting are resilient and secure because they have paper trails that can be audited, Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told CBS News on Wednesday.
He explained that while manual paper vote-counting can take time, paper ballots help auditors verify accurate results even if tabulating the votes gets messed up at some point.
The same is not true for electronic voting booths, which do not always generate a paper back-up, Krebs said.
He further explained to CNET that "If you're able to detect any sort of anomaly or something seems out of the ordinary, you want to be able to roll back the tape. And if you've got paper, you've got receipts. So you can build back up to what the accurate count is."
Krebs introduced his elections security plan last month at the annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference, as his office is coordinating with private cybersecurity researchers and state governments to deal with digital vulnerabilities, according to CBS.
"Disclosure is the key part in improving the cybersecurity of [election] services and systems," Krebs said. "Our goal is if [election officials] discover any sort of vulnerability or gap in the security posture, [they] have a process that you can work to close out that vulnerability."
Other security researchers also gave their backing to mail-in systems at Black Hat. Georgetown Law professor Matt Blaze said in his address at the conference that while mail-in and absentee voting systems are not foolproof, they are reliable, widely available, and lack many of the risks that can make digital voting systems problematic.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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