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Russian Election Hack

Experts: States need federal help to protect voting machines from Russian hackers

Erin Kelly
USA TODAY
Will Solada, 3, checks out the voting machines as his mother, Megan Solada, votes in Virginia. Center for Politics' Larry Sabato said on Fox News that he wanted an investigation of polls in Virginia that showed a double-digit lead for Democratic Sen. Mark Warner who wound up winning re-election by less than a point.

 

WASHINGTON — Congress needs to boost funding to states to help them buy secure voting machines to prevent Russia and other hostile nations from hacking U.S. elections, election experts told a House panel Wednesday.

"This is a critical need, and must be addressed immediately (to have an impact on the 2018 election)," said Edgardo Cortés, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections, which held statewide elections earlier this month.

Experts also recommended that states stop using touchscreen voting machines and replace them with paper-based systems such as optical scanners that tabulate paper ballots and provide tangible evidence of election results.

"In many electronic voting systems in use today, a successful attack that exploits a software flaw might leave behind little or no forensic evidence," warned Matthew Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. "This can make it effectively impossible to determine the true outcome of an election or even that a compromise has occurred."

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Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, said she is working on legislation to ensure that, whatever election system a state chooses, there is always some sort of paper backup to verify each vote.

In September, the Department of Homeland Security notified 21 states that Kremlin-linked hackers attempted to breach their systems during the 2016 election. Most of those attempts failed, and there was no evidence that any votes were changed.

However, in Illinois, the Russian hackers gained entry to the state's voter database and to the personal information of more than 90,000 voters, including their dates of birth and driver's licenses.

"Just because Russia did not tamper with ballots or reporting of election results during the last election, it doesn’t mean they or other adversaries won’t try to do so in the next election, or the election after that," said Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology, which led Wednesday's hearing.

"Like anything else in the digital age, electronic voting is vulnerable to hacking," Hurd said.

China, North Korea and Iran have the capability similar to Russia to launch cyber attacks against U.S. election systems, said Susan Klein Hennessey, a fellow in national security law and governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Cortés asked lawmakers to require federal certification of all voting systems used in federal elections, such as the 2018 congressional elections and the 2020 presidential election. He said that would ensure there is a security baseline that all states must meet.

In addition, he said Congress should establish an accreditation system for training state election administrators to make sure they have the skills and knowledge they need to run a secure election.

"We still have much more to do in Virginia and across the country to secure our election systems from threats," Cortés said.

Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler said he and other secretaries of state want to make sure the federal government doesn't take control of elections away from states.

"Each state has to decide for itself how best to secure their citizens’ election systems," he testified.

There are about 10,000 jurisdictions nationwide that administer elections, Hurd said.

A major hack against U.S. voting machines could only be done by a foreign government and would almost certainly be detected by U.S. officials, said Christopher Krebs, the senior official performing the duties of the under secretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate for the Department of Homeland Security, 

"We continue to assess that mounting widespread cyber operations against U.S. voting machines at a level sufficient to affect a national election would require a multi-year effort with significant human capital and information technology resources available only to nation states," Krebs testified. "The level of effort and scale required to significantly change a national election result, however, would make it nearly impossible to avoid detection."

Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson designated election systems as "critical infrastructure" in January and offered help to state and local election officials to ensure the security of voting machines. However, many states have been reluctant to accept assistance, fearing it could lead to a federal takeover of elections.

State election officials have argued that one of the reasons their elections have been so difficult to disrupt is because there is no central electronic database to hack. Election systems — and security practices — vary greatly from state to state.

Virginia was one of the states targeted by Russian hackers. The state, which held its election for governor and state legislature earlier this month, directed its counties to end the use of touchscreen voting machines because of the unacceptable risk that they could be breached. Virginia voters cast paper ballots instead in the Nov. 7 election, reflecting a growing trend by states to return to paper ballots.

Shortly after it notified the states of the hackers' efforts, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of an election security take force to try to enhance federal coordination with state and local election officials.

Krebs said DHS is leading an inter-agency effort to provide assistance to states that want help. He said that includes sharing information on threats and on the best ways to prevent a hack attack.

"There is no one-size-fits-all solution," he said. 

More:Paper ballots are back in vogue thanks to Russian hacking fears

More:Hackers at DefCon conference exploit vulnerabilities in voting machines

More:Russians tried to hack election systems of 21 states in 2016, officials say

More:Jeh Johnson: Congress, Trump must protect elections from cyber attacks

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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