Election Day Meltdown at The Polls?

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Arguably one of the most heated presidential campaigns in America’s recent history is almost over, early voting is underway, and on November 8th Americans will head to the polling stations to cast their vote.

One candidate is already arguing that the elections are rigged, but according to an article in Information Age, the really scary part about these election, is that the results may be significantly affected by outdated electronic voting systems. According to the article, many states are using voting systems that are 10 and even 15 years old, a lifetime in terms of technology integrity. These systems don’t meet the latest security and reliability standards.

Of course, other systems can also fail (take banking ATM machines for example) but it mainly involves temporary inconvenience until service is resumed and no critical data that is lost. Elections, however, are a one-off affair so service disruptions in the voting systems can impact the integrity of the elections altogether. With no extensive fail-over testing completed, an outage can end-up in lost votes. Again, at a bank this would be unacceptable not to protect the integrity of data.

At this point, it is probably too late to test the systems’ readiness and put a disaster recovery plan in place, but it is surely should be done for the next elections. So, let’s just hope the US elections go without critical IT glitches and everyone gets their voting in place to make sure that the democratic process prevails.

I invite you to continue reading on Information Age where the original article Nightmare at 1600: how an IT outage could determine the US election was published.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]