Is your county elections clerk ready for Russian hackers?

WASHINGTON — The weakest link in any local voting system is that one county clerk who’s been on the job for three days and opens up an email file that could take down the whole system.

The head of every U.S. intelligence agency says Russia attempted to penetrate elections systems nationwide during the 2016 presidential election, and will try again during this year’s midterm elections.

In a decentralized election system with more than 10,000 separate jurisdictions, the onus for security is on local officials.

“That keeps me awake at night,” said Nancy Blankenship, the clerk for Deschutes County, Ore.

Blankenship, like thousands of other county clerks, is the chief elections official for her area. It’s not so much the threat of foreign hackers changing votes that concerns Blankenship — Oregon is not only a vote-by-mail state, but also does its ballot counting without an internet connection — it’s the possibility that hacking could undermine public confidence in the system.

There are three major local cybersecurity threats during elections, said Maurice Turner, a senior technologist at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C.:

• Hackers could break into statewide, online voter registration databases to either steal personal information or change names, addresses or party affiliation to create confusion and discourage participation on Election Day.

• Hackers could attack a county website, taking it offline so that people could not see results after polls close.

• Hackers could take over social media accounts to broadcast false results from official sources, or announce falsely that polls are closing earlier or later than normal.

As election officials conduct primaries and prepare for the midterms in November, they must understand and meet security challenges so voters are confident in the election process, Turner said.

“We know we have an adversary that has a known interest and capability to make that threat a reality.”

All it takes is one clerk clicking on a link in one apparently legitimate email for a hacker to penetrate a county or state system. So-called phishing attempts — where hackers might gain passwords, usernames or personal information through unwitting officials — are becoming more and more sophisticated, Turner said. It’s a race between local information technology departments and hackers.

“Most people respond to phishing very well,” Turner said. “But there will always be a small number of people who will click on the links regardless of their training. And once an intruder breaks into the system, they may linger for several days or months.”

Despite the threat, many local officials are confident in their ability to keep a voting system safe from hackers.

Sara May-Silfee, the director of elections for Monroe County, a community of 170,000 in eastern Pennsylvania, said she knows her county is secure, even if her state was one of 21 states targeted by Russian hackers in 2016.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how they’d hack us,” she said. “Nothing is hooked up to anything. How could anybody hack us? I’m not worried about anything. Sometimes it seems like a lot of hullabaloo.”

A potential breach by hackers has never been brought up in Election Day training for Monroe County, said Andi McClanahan, who has served as a judge of elections for her ward for the past six years.