Hacking has been a major concern among voters during Election Day thanks in large part to past incidents which victimized the DNC. As a result, more voters have lost confidence in the ability of the electoral system to count their votes. Uncle Sam wants to assure the public that their votes are secure, however, as elite teams of tech expert are on the job.
USA Today reports that there have been no incidents of hacking detected running up to and on Election Day. The Department of Homeland security has been on the lookout and received no reports nor detected any security breach that’s related to the election. This doesn’t discount the possibility of hacking incidents involving other matters, but none related to the election.
The non-profit organization working towards accurate vote counting, Verified Voting confirmed the absence of hacking attempts as well via its president, Pamela Smith. According to Smith, everything is going well so far.
This isn’t particularly surprising as, aside from the government spending a tremendous amount of time and effort guarding the cyber frontier against attacks, private organizations are also putting down nets all over the place. These include the Election Verification Network, which is a non-partisan group that has enlisted the help of elite personnel to handle any hackers threatening to destabilize the election. Their team includes cryptographers, analysts, as well as digital security experts.
Even so, a lot of voters are still nervous about the outcome of the election and whether or not their votes will even be counted. During the 2008 election, one in ten voters were concerned that their votes will not be counted accurately. This time, that number has risen to one in six.
This is in no small part to the rhetoric coming from both sides of the aisle, claiming that the system is rigged to favor one candidate or the other. It also doesn’t help that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the least liked candidates in recent history.