The test began at 8 a.m. last Tuesday. Secretary of State Michele Reagan, four staffers and a freelance Spanish-language interpreter cast 138 votes on 40 ballots using seven touch-screen machines. The mood was jovial—until a printout showed the numbers on one machine didn’t line up with the master list of votes. Janine Petty, Arizona’s deputy state election director, scanned the printout and quickly discovered another of Ms. Reagan’s staffers had voted for two of the wrong candidates. The machine had worked perfectly, after all. Ms. Reagan jokingly admonished the sheepish staffer, telling him he should go on their fictional “Wall of Shame.” Across the country, state election officials are carrying out final tests on tens of thousands of voting machines that are part of a multistep process that delivers results in local, state and federal contests. Next week, the last of more than 120 million ballots are expected to be cast in a watershed election to determine who controls the White House, Congress and the direction of the Supreme Court.
In a span of hours, the votes will be counted in places ranging from the Moose Lodge in Key West, Fla., to a fire hall in Kodiak, Alaska, relayed to state capitals and then broadcast around the world. The process was designed so the federal government didn’t oversee it, but new fears about hackers from abroad have led to a scramble to see if the security protocols in place are sufficient.
In Arizona, officials have been on edge for months. In July, a Russia-linked hacker posted online the stolen login credentials of a Gila County election official, spooking Ms. Reagan and others around the country. They know now that protecting the voting process means guarding against much different threats than they have confronted in the past.
“We’re not dealing with a couple of kids sitting in their bedroom,” she said, sitting on an eight-seat plane on the way to Parker. “It’s cyberwarfare. These little state agencies are not the Pentagon. We don’t have the resources.”
Full Article: States Move to Protect Their Voting Systems – WSJ.