The fact that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 United States presidential election is one of the clearest takeaways from The Mueller Report written by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
"Over the course of my career I have seen a number of challenges to our democracy. The Russian government's effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious. This deserves the attention of every American," Mueller told a House committee in July.
Tech writer Andy Ihnatko joined Boston Public Radio on Friday to discuss if our next election cycle will again be susceptible to Russian interference.
"Let me make one thing really clear - We can still trust our elections. The ability to actually tamper with vote counts or the election databases is really really limited, it's almost impossible. If you really wanted to swing an election you would have to have people on the ground at every county, every state - maybe you could pull it off, but there's no way to be undetected."
Even with the low risk, Ihnatko says that it's important for counties and states using electronic voting machines to also record physical records in the case of interference.
"You can have electronic voting machines, but one of the recommendations of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Russian interference was that whatever system states and counties use, there has to be some sort of a paper record left behind," he said. "If there is any question that maybe these rolls were tampered with, there's a hard copy that would be almost impossible to tamper with, without gasoline and a match."
