Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Election protection gets boost
Gov. Scott reverses state decision to save U.S. cybersecurity funds for later
Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday ordered his top elections official to take advantage of $19 million of federal money for cybersecurity in time for this year’s elections.
Scott’s decree reverses the decision made by Secretary of State Ken Detzner, who said Tuesday he wanted to move slowly and preserve the money for long-term election needs.
The governor’s announcement comes after news media coverage of Detzner’s position, which the secretary of state outlined to reporters during the spring conference of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections in Fort Lauderdale.
“We’re going to follow the governor’s directive. I think it’s well pointed, and we’re going to move aggressively based on his direction to
submit a budget to the EAC and to try to draw down those dollars as soon as possible,” Detzner said Wedneday in an interview after the governor’s announcement. The EAC is the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the agency that was allocated $380 million for states to use on election security and technology in the $1.3 trillion federal spending plan passed in March.
The reversal came less than 24 hours after Detzner said the money wouldn’t be available for the 2018 elections. “It’s easy and nice to have money,” Detzner said Tuesday afternoon, adding that “I want to make sure that this $19 million looks at what are the real needs, short term and long term . ... We want to have a plan. We want to make sure that this $19 million can serve us not only for this election year but for future election years too, because when that money is gone we don’t know if there will ever be any money again.”
Detzner, who is in Fort Lauderdale attending the elections supervisors’ conference, said Wednesday he learned county elections officials see a need for more assistance in 2018. “I’ve heard a lot of things here today. There seems to be the demand for some additional resources, and based on the governor’s directive, I’m going to follow that directive to the letter,” he said.
Detzner said on Tuesday that he didn’t have authority from the state Legislature to spend the money, although the Joint Legislative Budget Commission can authorize spending before the next legislative session. States have to provide a match of 5 percent of the allocation. In Florida’s case, that would be $959,000.
Scott is facing the voters this year. Term limits prohibit him from seeking a third term as governor. Instead, he’s challenging U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. “The integrity of our elections is paramount, and we’ll keep fighting to ensure that every Floridian continues to have confidence in our elections process. By directing DOS to draw down more federal funding, we are providing the resources our local elections officials need to keep our elections secure,” the governor said in a written statement.
Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Nelson criticized the Scott administration’s initial decision to forgo use of the money for the 2018 elections.
“Of $380 million for the country, $19 million of it was set aside for my state, the state of Florida,” Nelson said. “And while at least a dozen other states have taken advantage by applying for and receiving the funding to help them protect their systems better from Russian intrusion, my state of Florida hasn’t even applied for single dollar of the $19 million set aside for Florida. Not one. … When you consider the risk and what Russia did, that the intelligence community all agreed did to us in the last election, why in the world would the state of Florida not apply for any of the $19 million set aside for our state?”
In the announcement that he was reversing his elections agency, Scott said his administration has acted to enhance voting security. He pointed to county and state modernization of voting and voter registration systems, an appropriation of $1.9 million in state money for supervisor of elections to buy a system to monitor and respond to cyber threats.
State and county governments are involved in running elections in Florida. On the state level, the Division of Elections in Detzner’s office oversees elections, which are run by the supervisors of election in each county.
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher, who runs one of the largest elections offices in the state, said the change was the correct course.
“Good, because we’re headed to an election,” Bucher said. “Congress appropriated the money so we could use it for the upcoming election, not save it for later.”
Paul Lux, supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County and incoming president of the state supervisors’ association, said he didn’t know more about the reversal than he read Wednesday afternoon on Twitter.
“Anywhere that that federal money can come in and be a help, certainly to the small counties or to the medium-sized counties that need the additional assistance, I’d say any time we can get more money from the federal government it’s a good thing,” Lux said.
Federal warnings
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security representatives attending the supevisors conference had a central message for elections officials: Keep upping cybersecurity efforts because malicious forces are lurking, ready to infiltrate systems if they can.
“The threats are real,” said Klint Walker, the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity adviser for eight southeastern states. “Cyber-attack is like that hurricane threat. There’s always a threat out there.”
Voting systems are “an attractive target for bad actors,” said David Wulf, the acting deputy assistant secretary for infrastructure protection.
The potential threats are widespread. The agency’s official slideshow included a picture of a North Carolina elections website that was hacked so it displayed a message from ISIS. Another touched on the ransomware attack that disabled many of Atlanta’s city government functions.
Cybersecurity threats don’t necessarily come from ISIS or Russians. Charles M. Wallen, who works on information and infrastructure security, said many of the threats are the same faced by any workplace: phishing scams that attempt to get people to click on the link in an email that then introduces something malicious to the computer system. Identity thieves, looking to access voters’ personal information, broke into systems in Arizona and Illinois.
When a Homeland Security panelist asked who had hurricane plans, almost every one of the more than 250 people raised their hands. Fewer than half indicated they had cyber response plans.
Matt Masterson, senior cybersecurity adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, later said Florida state and local officials are taking the right steps to keep elections systems safe, but he declined to offer an assessment about whether Florida is doing better or worse than other states.
“They’re taking the steps that I think they need to take,” he said. “We have found Florida to be a very willing partner and very engaged with us.”