Summary

Nowhere in the text of the US Constitution is there an explicit reference to an affirmative right to vote. And yet, the Constitution and its amendments contain numerous provisions relating to the integrity of elections – what counts as a valid or legitimate electoral process. For the Framers of the Constitution, election integrity was fundamentally about ensuring that, if elections were held, only qualified persons could vote. The argument we advance in this contribution is that the twenty-first century challenge of safeguarding elections from cyber threats must be understood as part of this history, and not solely as a niche engineering or information security problem. In information security, a hacker is someone who uses their skills and knowledge of digital systems to solve problems or achieve desired outcomes, even if it means subverting those systems. Hackers may don a metaphorical white, black, or gray hat, depending on whether their actions and goals are rightful, wrongful, or somewhere in between. We port this concept over to election integrity and its preoccupation with hackers of a different kind: political hackers who use their skills and knowledge of law, psychology, and democratic procedures to subvert those procedures in pursuit of their political interests. History is riddled with legitimate and illegitimate efforts to “hack” elections, and cyber risks to election integrity, though real, cannot (perhaps yet) shine a candle to the myriad other ways that intrepid hackers have sought to subvert democracy. An all-hazards approach to election integrity is warranted.

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