ABC News reported–actually, a group confessed to ABC–to hacking into the Chicago Election Board’s voter registration system. This story is pretty interesting because of the claims made by the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project about what they could have done to the database if they had wanted to be evil. Here is the lead from the story.

As if there weren’t enough concerns about the integrity of the vote, a non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter database for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago.

Bob Wilson, an official with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project — which bills itself as a not-for-profit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficiencies — tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, including their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth.

In reading the story, several questions come to mind. First, did this guy commit a crime hacking into the database? Second, what will it take before Congress empowers the EAC to create real standards for voter registration systems? (Or even gives them money to create some voluntary standards?) Third, what if someone actually did hack an delate a state VR system? What would happen? Could it happen?