Top 4 Reasons the 2016 Election Could End in Chaos

3. There Has Never Been a Greater Risk for Mass Election Fraud

Given the inherent confusion of our electoral system for many people, and both candidates already sowing the seeds of distrust at the election’s result, now imagine what would happen if there were also an actual orchestrated attempt by an unknown party to illegally influence the election’s outcome? Well, it’s already happening, we just haven’t voted yet.

Over the past few weeks, a probable foreign power has been hacking into Democratic communications to create Wikileaks dumps, and possibly into two state’s voting systems. In Politico’s article prior to these most recent hacks, they stated that nearly twenty states have at various times been attacked. Since the early 2000s most American states have switched from paper ballots to the cutting-edge, utterly secure science of electronic voting machines. The only problem is that the machines aren’t cutting-edge, and they’re not even remotely secure.

Stephen Spoonamore, a cyber security expert for the banking industry and government has been screaming about this problem for years. He states:

“There is no electronic system in the world that can’t be hacked.”

and

“You can’t make voting machines less vulnerable, but only make them transparent.”

Except, many of the country’s voting machines are still apparently lacking in transparency because their software is proprietary and privately owned by just a handful of companies like Diebold (Premier Election Solutions/Dominion) and ES&S, who refuse independent audits of their results or programming (odd, huh?). Diebold also happened to be indicted for massive fraud by the FBI in 2013. So even if there isn’t a hack by an outside power, who’s watching the guys running the machines?

In his interview, Mr. Spoonamore cites multiple (not just one), ways to hack into their systems, with most of them as easy as what any teenager with an online connection could accomplish. The truly frightening thing about all this is that the upcoming presidential election could be manipulated by almost anyone from around the country, or world, with an internet connection. This includes the Russians, ISIS, or that kid that stole your debit card last spring.

Keep in mind that this article isn’t talking about how someone could successfully completely overthrow the election, that might be a tall order, but is only exploring what the odds are for confusion and chaos at its end. And as The Atlantic spells out, the advent of electronic voting without uniform paper tracking or auditing has opened up a huge degree of risk that our vote totals will be suspect, whether or not they are actually fraudulently influenced.

All it takes is for one state to be strongly disputed, and then we’re right back in a situation like 2000, but arguably far worse given points 1 and 2. The only way its conclusion will not be disputed is with proper, accurate, trusted information, from objective third parties.

Which brings us to reason 4 why there could be chaos at the election’s end…