DeSantis orders review of election security

Gov.: Acting in response to FBI confirmation of 2016 hacking

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday ordered a review of the security of the state’s elections systems.

He said he was acting in response to confirmation from the FBI that hackers managed to gain access to two Florida counties’ election systems during the 2016 election. The governor and other elected officials briefed by the FBI have said no election results were compromised and it appeared as if the intruders didn’t meddle with voter registration records.

DeSantis directed Secretary of State Laurel M. Lee to initiate a review of elections systems security and cybersecurity throughout the state. In light of recent information that two Florida counties experienced breaches into their elections networks in 2016, the governor wants to ensure Florida’s election infrastructure at the state and local level is protected.

“Public faith in our elections is the bedrock of our democracy and we must do everything within our power to preserve the integrity of our elections systems,” DeSantis said in a written statement distributed by his office. “While the breaches did not compromise the outcome of the 2016 election, nonetheless, they highlight the importance of protecting the security of our elections system.”

DeSantis said he was ordering Lee to “immediately” initiate a review of the overall security, and specifically the cybersecurity, of Florida election systems.

“The Department shall develop a plan to identify and address any vulnerabilities. You are further directed to make this a top priority,” DeSantis told Lee in a letter ordering the review. He didn’t set a deadline.

DeSantis’ posture stands in contrast with President Donald Trump, a close ally of the governor.

The New York Times reported last month that former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had tried to get the White House interested in preparing for Russian attempts to interfere in the 2020 election but was told by Trump’s chief of staff not to bring the subject up in front of the president.

The Times reported that the chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, “made it clear that Mr. Trump still

equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory” and that the topic should be “kept below his level.”

The issue has generated intense interest in Florida since last month’s release of a redacted version of Special Counsel Robert

Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mueller reported the tantalizing detail that the FBI found Russian efforts to infiltrate Florida election offices’ computer systems were successful enough that intruders were able to “gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.”

On May 14, DeSantis announced that he’d had a classified FBI briefing at which he was told two county election systems were compromised. The FBI told him and the state’s congressional delegation during a classified May 16 briefing that the names of the counties couldn’t be disclosed. All said the FBI should declassify the information. Broward and Palm Beach weren’t among the hacked counties.

Like DeSantis, the members of Congress were told the intruders gained limited access to the systems, that election results weren’t tampered with, but any activities involving voter registration records wasn’t as clear.

“They have no evidence that the voter database was tampered with, but their level of confidence was unclear,” U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz, R-St. Augustine, said last week.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a MiamiDade/Monroe County Democrat, said, “We couldn’t get with certainty the verification that the Russians actually were not able to manipulate the data that they had access to. [The FBI] found no evidence of that, but they could not say with certainty that [the Russians] did not manipulate that data.”

Mucarsel-Powell said the FBI’s description of the intrusion suggested “they were able to enter the garage, not able to enter the house.”

The intrusions involved “spearphishing” emails from Russian intelligence to more than 120 Florida election office email accounts. That allowed the intrusion into the two counties.

The state has a history of exceedingly close elections — in 2016, Trump won the state with 49% of the vote, 1.2 percentage points ahead of Democrat Hillary Clinton — so anything that could interfere with the way they are run could undermine confidence in the results.

Florida distributed more than $14.5 million in federal election security money to county supervisors of elections last year. The state also provided elections supervisors with $1.9 million in state funding to purchase and install Albert network monitoring sensors which provide round-the-clock monitoring of government technology networks to identify potential threats.

All but one county is covered with Albert sensors. The lone holdout, Palm Beach County, is expected to have the monitoring system in place by the end of June, Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link said last week.