Suggestion: Request your local election board's security policies

In today’s New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci reminds us about the vulnerability of American elections to hacking. For something so central to our democracy, we spend far too little money making sure they are well administered.

One of the key issues is that, even for President, we don’t have one election, we have thousands, all administered differently by local Boards of Election.

My town, Cambridge, MA, uses optically scanned paper ballots, a generally well regarded method as you have paper backup if the machine tallying is ever called into question. I’ve watched the vote count, it seems well run, but I have no idea what what happens behind the scenes.

I decided to fix that and have filed a public records to request to see the security polices, both physical and information, governing our voting infrastructure (https://www.muckrock.com/foi/cambridge-5/security-policies-regarding-machines-and-computer-systems-involved-in-collecting-and-tabulating-votes-27672/).

I urge folks to ask the same of their local election boards.

• Saul