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Voting machines await use at the Essex County Board of Elections in Elizabethtown, New York.
ELIZABETHTOWN | As fears of election tampering loom large, the state Board of Elections is rolling out bolstered security measures to safeguard against possible threats this November.
The state agency has strengthened cybersecurity training for local election officials.
They’ve also created a new centralized security center to increase state and county response to incidents, and have numerous tech upgrades planned, including intrusion detection and managed security services devices for all county boards of elections.
Those tools will be “formidable” for county election boards once completed, said Todd D. Valentine, co-executive director of the state Board of Elections.
“It will include round-the-clock monitoring and management of (intrusion detection systems) and firewalls, rigorous patch management, security assessments and audits and help in responding to emergencies,” Valentine said in a statement on Wednesday.
ONGOING THREATS
New York state voters head to the polls on Thursday for primary contests, the first statewide election since 2016.
The U.S. intelligence community has since determined Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election in order to benefit President Donald Trump.
Twelve Russian intelligence officers were indicted in July for hacking the Democratic National Committee, resulting in the first indictments in the special counsel's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Intelligence officials have repeatedly warned Russia or others are continuing to seek to disrupt the electoral process, and election security risks are now among the "principal security threats" facing the nation, said U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
Cheryl Couser, a spokesman for the state Board of Elections, said there is no indication any attempts have been made to compromise the state’s voting system.
“None,” Couser told The Sun.
EXTENSIVE TRAINING
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security earlier this summer co-hosted a series of regional “tabletop” scenarios with local officials and the state Board of Elections that cycled through potential scenarios and risks, including social media manipulation and disruption of voter registration databanks and voting machines.
Officials from the Clinton County Board of Elections participated in a training session with state and federal stakeholders at the U.S. Oval last month.
Clinton County Republican Election Commissioner Greg Campbell declined to discuss specific details, citing sensitive security concerns.
“It was a pretty extensive training program,” Campbell said.
Campbell said he felt “very confident” heading into Thursday’s election, citing the closed system used by county election boards statewide.
New York state uses paper ballots that are fed into voting machines, which are essentially inert metal boxes until workers insert a card into the unit to calculate the ballots.
The machines, which are kept in secure locations, do not contain online ports, resulting in a “air gap” to ensure the secure transfer of data.
“At no time does anyone from the outside have the ability to access machines or the ballot itself,” Campbell said.
Campbell likes the paper ballot system. Some states have had issues with touchscreen devices, he said, including Georgia, where a good government group is suing the state, contending the machines are susceptible to hacking.
There have also been cases where a voter selected one candidate using a touchscreen device, but programming issues resulted in the vote being tabulated for another, Campbell said.
Touchscreen devices also cannot verify voting records, he said, but paper ballots can ensure votes can be manually recounted if necessary.
“It’s got some great redundancy built into it, and we feel very confident,” Campbell said.
NO WAY TO HACK
Officials have historically been concerned over the prospects of a bad actor sitting outside of a polling place with a laptop to hack into a voting machine with the intent of manipulating results.
Essex County Board of Elections Republican Commissioner Allison McGahay said doing so is impossible under the state’s system.
“There is no way for someone from the outside of the polling place to hack into the voting machine,” McGahay told The Sun.
Machines in Essex County are kept in a secure unit with no internet access until Election Day, when they are dispatched to polling places around the county.
Once polls close, cards containing the vote tally are transported in a sealed bag by a sheriff's deputy to a sealed unit of the board of elections in Elizabethtown, where the cards are inserted into a computer and the information is downloaded onto a memory stick.
The device is then transported to election headquarters, where the results are uploaded online by a bipartisan team of staffers.
The stick is then scrubbed and erased for later reuse.
New York state also backs up voter registration databases to avoid potential disruptions by hackers.
“We as boards of elections are constantly backing up data to ensure if it’s wiped out on one system, it’s backed up on another system,” McGahay said.
Additional security measures include mandatory "logic and accuracy testing" of the voting machine setup before each election, as well as a random audit of three percent of the machines used in each county following every election.
Essex County’s information technology department is also required to keep up-to-date on cybersecurity training.
“We deploy a number of firewalls and appliances, intrusion detection and those kinds of things,” said Essex County Manager Dan Palmer.
REMAINING VIGILANT
As a result of the measures that have implemented over the past decade, the state Board of Elections says they’re ahead of the curve when it comes to safeguards.
Of the 19 state-directed recommendations in a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, New York state already complies with 14 of them.
The state is studying two additional recommendations that involve risk-limiting audits, while two others don't apply to New York because the state does not utilize electronic poll books, according to the agency.
“It is gratifying that our hard work over the past decade has been validated by national experts and academics,” said Robert Brehm, co-executive director of the state Board of Elections. “As threats to our elections continue to evolve, we have to remain vigilant.”
The boosted security measures were made possible by recent injections of state and federal funding, including $19.4 million allocated over the next five years by Congress as part of a $380 million package approved in July, joining $5 million the state legislature appropriated in this year’s budget.
FUNDING FLAP
But the funding has not been without political controversy.
House Republicans in July torpedoed an effort by Democrats to boost election security spending.
In a theatrical showdown on the House floor, Democrats accused Republicans of being soft on Russia.
But the GOP contended Congress had fully funded states’ election security needs over the years and that states still had “plenty of grant money” left to spend from the $380 million allocation.
The vote was a procedural motion — not a legislative vote.
Tom Flanagin, a spokesman for Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-Willsboro), called it a “procedural gimmick.”
Stefanik voted to maintain the rules of the House and consider the underlying legislation, he said.
“As a leader in combatting Russian aggression and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am pleased this bill includes funding to address election security issues,” said Stefanik in a statement. “Protecting our political institutions from foreign meddling is a top concern for Congress, and I will continue to work with my colleagues on recommendations and initiatives to ensure our elections are secure.”
Registered voters can find their poll site for Thursday's primary and the general election in November here.
