While the totality of the National Academy of Sciences report on voting technology is sobering, a country with the resources and technical expertise of the United States can make great progress, and quickly, if it garners sufficient political will and resources.
"What if a system is hacked? What if a tally is altered? What if voter intentions are distorted? In an electronic-only system, it can be quite difficult — if not impossible — to determine that any of this happened, let alone to figure out the actual results of the election," says Faculty Associate Zeynep Tufekci. "Clearly, this presents a challenging set of circumstances, especially in an already polarized environment characterized by extremely close elections governed by a winner-takes-all system."