Why Cybersecurity in Elections Matters
by Katherine Rollings and Marshall McCann
Like many people across Canada and around the world, you may have closely followed the United States 2020 Presidential Election months ago and maybe, you watched the previous American election four years before. The commonality between both of those elections was that election security was heavily scrutinized. And in the 2016 election, that scrutiny was warranted as it’s been proven that there was significant tampering in the outcome of the general election.
But why does this matter? And what does it have to do with you?
Election hacking is becoming an increasingly common event in democracies around the world — between 2012 and 2016, virtual election tampering increased by 10% globally. This is an especially dangerous trend because elections are a core institution of a functioning democracy. When election systems are hacked or a great portion of the electorate is digitally fed misinformation, it taints the credibility of the election’s outcome. Without credibility, the winner of an election could be rendered illegitimate to segments of the electorate — this disenfranchises the candidate, their right to govern, and the democracy as a whole.
The consequences of election tampering may seem perceptibly distant to you as a young Canadian but it couldn’t be any more relevant. Most people, especially younger people, use social media. In the 2016 American election, the major pathway through which Russian hackers tampered with the election was by spreading misinformation on Facebook — using the existing algorithms of the platform to disadvantage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the general election.
Fortunately, within the last five years, nationally and globally, nations have improved cybersecurity to target misinformation campaigns on social media and the hacking of election systems. Canada has developed an entire agency supporting Elections Canada to monitor and defend Canadian election security.
Sources
Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. (2021). Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://cyber.gc.ca/en/guidance/global-baseline-known-events.
Lipton, E. (2021). The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. (Published 2016). Nytimes.com. Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html.
