State officials are reassuring members of Congress that the integrity of November’s elections is secure amid growing concerns over cyberattacks by foreign actors tied to Russia. In an open letter to Congress, the National Association of Secretaries of State warns against damaging public confidence in the electoral process. The group, made up of bipartisan election administrators across the nation, says security measures currently in place are sufficient to guarantee an accurate vote count.
Vote-counting systems “have their own fail-safes and contingency solutions that would make it highly difficult to leverage them for changing outcomes,” the association said. “Poll books, printed records, back-ups and back-ups of back-ups all provide multiple layers of security around this part of the process.”
The association said there is no fix-all to guard against all cyberattacks but pointed out that recent hacks of voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois are unconnected to separate systems that tally votes.
The decentralized nature of American election administration acts as its own safeguard, the association said. In November, Americans will vote at hundreds of thousands of polling locations, and those votes are counted by more than 9,000 election administrators, making large-scale hacking almost impossible, it added. What’s more, voting machines themselves are not connected to the internet, providing more security.
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