AST Oct/Nov Digital Magazine 8 | Page 22

Volume 8 and range of solutions to save lives, secure highvalue locations and apprehend non-compliant vessels. Collaborating with various government and local agencies, our team is dedicated to your security needs. For more information, please visit the company website at http://boatstoppers.com/ Good luck to Maritime Arresting Technologies on becoming a Winner of the American Security Today’s Homeland Security Awards Program! Oct/Nov 2016 Edition The Security Challenge of e-Voting As threats become more sophisticated, and always-connected electronic voting machines become more widely used, tampering with voting results is a risk that is pretty easy to predict will increase over time. Guest Editorial by Anthony Giandomenico, Senior Security Strategist and Office of the CTO at Fortinet Countries where open elections occur have often developed arcane rules and processes for casting, collecting, and tabulating votes, in part because counting and managing votes is so time-consuming, but also because different groups, especially those with power, have strongly vested interests not only in the outcome, but in the process itself. In the US, for example, Americans don’t actually vote for Presidential candidates, but for slates of “electors” pledged to support those candidates. In fact, the US President is actually chosen by an Electoral College of 538 individuals, and needs a majority of 270 votes to win. Many Americans are completely unaware of this process, nor that once their states’ electors are chosen they don’t actually have to vote for the candidate they were elected to cast their vote for. But among those who understand the Electoral College process, a growing number feel it’s time for a change to one person - one vote popular election model. We have the technology, they argue, to put in place an electronic voting system that would allow for a popular vote to take place, and for results to be tabulated immediately. Not so fast. There are serious security issues surrounding online elections that will need to be sorted out before something like this can become a 22