Senators press for 2018 election security

WASHINGTON >> With the 2018 elections already underway, senators chided the current and former secretaries of Homeland Security on Wednesday for not more strongly warning the American public about past Russian intrusions in state election systems and for a lack of urgency to protect balloting this year.

Kirstjen Nielsen, President Donald Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, testified alongside Jeh Johnson, secretary under former President Barack Obama, as the Senate intelligence committee launched an effort to protect the country’s election security after Russian agents targeted election systems in 21 states ahead of the 2016 general election. There’s no evidence that any hack in the November 2016 election affected election results, but the attempts rattled state election officials and prompted the federal government and states to examine the way votes are counted.

Senators on the panel have criticized both administrations for not moving quickly enough to stem the Russian threat and continued to do so at the hearing. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, critiqued Nielsen’s opening statement, which described a series of efforts the department had announced.

“I hear no sense of urgency to really get on top of this issue,” Collins said, noting that 2018 elections are already underway.

Collins noted that many state election officials have remained without security clearances, making it harder for the department to share information with them.

To speed up communications and intelligence sharing, the department has been working to grant security clearances to up to three election officials in each state. Nielsen said Wednesday that just 20 of those officials have been granted full clearances.

“We are doing our best to speed up the process,” Nielsen said, adding that the department has a policy in place to provide information on immediate threats to state and local election officials even if clearances have yet to be granted.

Communication and intelligence sharing by the federal government has been a key concern among state and local election officials. Those officials complained that it took the federal government nearly a year to inform them whether their states had been targeted by Russian hackers.

Collins, who has introduced legislation with other members of the committee to improve election cybersecurity, also pressed Johnson, asking if he should have issued stronger warnings in 2016 as it became clear that Russians were trying to intrude into the systems.

Johnson defended the way he alerted state and local election officials, noting that in the late summer and fall of 2016 he was repeatedly issuing public warnings for those officials to get cybersecurity assistance from the department.

“We were beating the drum pretty hard,” Johnson said.