U.S. intelligence officials and security experts have spent years urging states to shore up their elections’ digital defenses, and the latest indictments from special counsel Robert Mueller drew fresh attention to Russia’s cyberattacks on the 2016 presidential election. But less than four months before the midterm elections that will shape the rest of Donald Trump’s presidency, most states’ election offices have failed to fix their most glaring security weaknesses, according to a POLITICO survey of all 50 states. And few states are planning steps that would improve their safeguards before November, even after they receive their shares of the $380 million in election security funding that Congress approved in March. Only 13 states said they intend to use the federal dollars to buy new voting machines. At least 22 said they have no plans to replace their machines before the election — including all five states that rely solely on paperless electronic voting devices, which cybersecurity experts consider a top vulnerability.
In addition, almost no states conduct robust, statistic-based post-election audits to look for evidence of tampering after the fact. And fewer than one-third of states and territories have requested a key type of security review from the Department of Homeland Security.
Almost none of the 40 states that responded to POLITICO provided full details of how they plan to spend their shares of the money.
The holes in states’ preparedness contrast with the alarming details that Mueller offered Friday about the extent of Russian hackers’ operations in 2016 — as well as Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats’ warning the same day that election systems and the other “digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack.”
Full Article: States slow to prepare for hacking threats – POLITICO.