It is a pretty good bet that you lock your car, lock the doors of your house, and keep your vital papers in a safe place. You have a virus detector on your computer and are careful not to click on links in strangers’ e-mails.

After all, who wants intruders into one’s personal life, either in the form of a thief in the kitchen, or a thief on your hard drive?

Given all the revelations of the past year or so, we have to ask: does it really matter? The latest shocker, but surely not the last, is the theft of data of 50 million Facebook users for political purposes. Before that were the giant data breaches at Equifax, Yahoo, eBay, Target and many other large firms with which we have entrusted our information.

Political hacking takes the theft to a new level, bearing the prospect of swaying our free vote in one direction or another through falsehoods and, even worse, tampering with actual vote counts.

States are locking down their electoral computers and in both Gloucester an...