Rising to speak in the House of Commons in November 1947, Winston Churchill – by then no longer prime minister but still member of parliament, his party having been defeated in the general election of May 1945 – remarked that “No one pretends that democracy is perfect … Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Churchill felt especially convinced that it was superior to those varieties of governance that relied upon “a group of super men and super-planners … ‘playing angel’ … and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction.” The following year, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed. While the term democracy is not mentioned, its essence is enshrined in the document, signed by democracies and autocracies alike: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

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.