The nation’s top election officials are calling for more stringent guidelines for post-election audits, as supporters of former President Donald Trump continue to relitigate his defeat in 2020. At the summer meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State, secretaries voted nearly unanimously on Monday to approve a series of recommendations for post-election audits on everything from a timeline, to chain of custody of election materials. The guidelines were shared first with POLITICO. During the vote, only two Republican secretaries present didn’t back it: West Virginia Secretary Mac Warner, who voted against it, and Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who abstained. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat who was part of a bipartisan group of 8 secretaries who helped draft the guidelines, told POLITICO after the vote that they had been working in secret for months to come to an agreement, comparing the pact the secretaries took to not speak about their work until it was completed to the movie “Fight Club.” The vote came at the tail end of the group’s four-day conference, the first time the organization has gathered in person since before the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
National: Their work secured the election. It also paved the way for pro-Trump conspiracies. | Kevin Collier/NBC
Watching coverage of pro-Trump rioters storm the Capitol building Jan. 6, Matt Bernhard had to wonder: How much were he and his colleagues to blame? “We spent the last five years putting in all this work,” said Bernhard, an engineer at VotingWorks, a nonprofit election technology company, and an expert in election cybersecurity. “And somehow despite all that, there was the worst insurrection in the country since the Civil War because people don’t trust the outcome.” Like all cybersecurity research, election security relies heavily on the premise that to make any system better, you first need to draw attention to the ways people can hack it. Bernhard’s peers have done that with gusto since the beginning of the Trump administration. They’ve showed how, in the right isolated circumstances, a voter registration machine can be rewired to play the 90s computer game Doom, or how a child could hack a vulnerable website that was coded to look like Florida’s election night reporting site. While their research heavily contributed to security upgrades ahead of the contentious 2020 election — one that election officials jointly called “the most secure in American history” — it has proven to be a double-edged sword. Election cybersecurity researchers who spoke with NBC News say they worry it also provided ammunition to bad-faith actors who have sought to convince some Americans that the election was illegitimate. “We always knew we were walking a bit of a scary line when flagging vulnerabilities,” Maggie MacAlpine, an election security researcher, said. “We’re always battling the fact that the appearance of a hack can be as impactful on an election as an actual hack.”
Full Article: Trump conspiracies strain election cybersecurity experts