The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Armed against vote tampering
Connecticut election officials say they are readily prepared
As they readied for one of the most anticipated midterm elections in years, with memories of 2016 Russian interference on their minds, Connecticut election officials said they felt confident last week that they were prepared to conduct a secure, tamper-free election Tuesday.
Connecticut is a leading state in election security, said Susannah Goodman, director of the election security program for the nonpartisan election-watchdog organization Common Cause.
“Connecticut has always had paper (ballots). They’ve done these (post-election) audits. The other thing is that Connecticut does not allow is internet voting,” said Goodman. “Thirty-two states allow some subsets of voters to send ballots over the internet. And that is a huge problem.”
Connecticut was one of 21 targets in the Russian cyber attacks during the 2016 election. But its closed-loop system successfully thwarted the attempt. Voting machines in Connecticut are not connected to the internet, reducing fears of hacking. Paper ballots allow officials to check election results.
“We do not anticipate cyber problems,” said Ron Malloy, Democratic registrar of voters in Stamford and older brother of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. “I don’t see how it’s going to happen.”
On Election Day, a team including officials from the Secretary of the State’s office, State Police, the FBI and the National Guard will be monitoring Connecticut election systems, ready to act if necessary.
At their spring conference and training, local voting officials saw a stronger emphasis on hardening election systems against hacking and phishing, said Linda Grace, Bridgeport’s Republican registrar of voters. Registrars now use more-secure passwords and two-factor authentication to access election systems.
While all registrars of voters — there
are two per town — undergo training, election practices in each town vary slightly, depending on local issues including, the size of communities and their budgets.
Stuart W. Wells III, who has been the Norwalk Democratic registrar for 10 years, has been downloading the list of 53,000 Norwalk voters every day and examining it for inexplicable changes, something state officials do, too. The voter roll is one part of the election system that is on internet servers.
“It’s the canary in the coal mine type-of-thing,” Wells said. “If we saw a lot of changes we couldn’t account for, we would let (the state) know right away. We get a pretty good early warning that way.”
Regional election monitors
In Fairfield County, however, councils of government (COGs) have opted to bypass one election bulwark — a regional election monitor.
The Western Connecticut Council of Government — which contains Greenwich east through Westport and north to New Milford — and the Connecticut Metro Council of Government — the Bridgeport area — both opted not to employ a regional election monitor in 2018. The seven other COGs in the state all hired monitors, according to the Secretary of the State’s office.
In Connecticut, where elections are run by local officials in the 169 towns, regional election monitors make sure pre-election preparations are satisfactory; assist when problems arise on Election Day; and help audit election results. This fall the Secretary of the State’s office received a $5 million federal grant, part of which it allocated to pay regional election monitors to conduct addition training in cybersecurity with local registrars.
“The Secretary of the State can’t possibly spend large amounts of time with each (town),” said Galen Wells, regional election monitor for the Naugatuck Valley. “If you have people who are having problems, you can spend a great deal more time with them and get to know what their problems are.”
Wells was a regional monitor for the Western Connecticut COG in 2016 and 2017, when the position was fully funded by the state legislature. She was paid $11,000 a year, she said.
“The leadership discussed this and decided that municipalities who feel they need a regional election monitor (in 2018) can contract on their own terms,” said Francis Pickering, executive director of Western Connecticut COG. “We did poll all registrars of voters in region and this essentially emerged from that poll.”
The Bridgeport metro COG never hired a regional election monitor. The COG’s board did not want to hire a monitor without a continuous state funding source, out of concerns it would become an unfunded mandate, said Matt Fulda, executive director of the COG.
Perceptions of voting
Mary Ann Doran, a Republican registrar of voters in Danbury, said she was more concerned about fraudulent voting than cyber security.
“You could pick up a piece of mail out of my address and go to the poll and vote for me,” said Doran. “I know from talking to my poll workers when we do the training about what is an acceptable ID, that’s their biggest concern.”
Numerous studies on voting fraud have been conducted by universities and media outlets and concluded that incidence of voting fraud is infinitesimally small. News21, a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, found just 56 cases of noncitizens voting between 2000 and 2011.
Nevertheless, talk of voter fraud and election security concerns have contributed to a worsening public perception, said Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, who is seeking re-election.
“Every single day someone asks me if their ballot will be counted and is it safe?” said Merrill, the most recent past-President of the National Association of Secretaries of State, and current chair of the Cyber Security Committee. “I think in Connecticut people are feeling a little bit better, but nationwide... this was the real goal of the Russians.”
“The leadership discussed this and decided that municipalities who feel they need a regional election monitor (in 2018) can contract on their own terms.”
Francis Pickering, executive director of Western Connecticut COG