Election officials need more funds to guard against hacks

Illinois’ Cook County says it has a fix — if it just had the money

Illinois’ most populous county has a plan to keep hackers out of its voting system, breached during last year’s presidential race. There’s one big sticking point: Money.

The director of elections for Cook County and a group including Ambassador Douglas Lute will present a strategy to bolster the U.S. system’s defenses against foreign intruders Thursday. That road map comes with a request for the federal government to fund their plan, underlining a hurdle for many municipalities as they head into the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections.

While last year’s general election made clear the voting system was vulnerable — and the federal government has instructed the nation’s 9,000 election officials to make their voting rolls safer — many municipalities lack funding to make these changes.

The last time there was significant federal funding for election infrastructure at the local level was the Help America Vote Act of 2002, passed in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election recount. That resulted in almost $3 billion in funds for new voting equipment.

“For a relatively modest investment it seems to me that we can shore up the system significantly,” Noah Praetz told USA TODAY.

His five-page plan, sponsored by Cook County Clerk David Orr, is part of a broader effort by an ad hoc biparti- san group working to strengthen the U.S. election system after Russian intrusions during the 2016 U.S. presidential race. It calls on the federal government to aid states, laying out a list of 20 defense tactics election officials can take to protect election integrity.

“Make no mistake, this will be a painful and expensive undertaking,” it reads.

Just how expensive isn’t known. The U.S. election system is highly decentralized. Each jurisdiction has different staff, equipment and funding and must deal with differing local and state regu- lations governing elections.

For Cook County, which is responsible only for county-wide elections as the city of Chicago holds its own elections, “it’s going to cost many millions.” Praetz said he couldn’t be more specific because the county is in the middle of a procurement process.

Even hundreds of millions is just “a rounding error of the defense department budget,” said Lute, a retired threestar general who served under both Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

“What we’re buying is hard defense for America to the tune of $700 billion a year. And for literally less than one-one-thousandth of that, we could make dra- matic inroads to secure our election systems. Which quite frankly may be more fundamental (to our security) than the next fighter plane,” he said.

The problem with Russia, which denied any interference in the U.S. election, isn’t going to go away, election officials say. The 2016 attacks were a classic Russian intelligence military operation.

“I expect that in 2018 they will be back, with a much more sophisticated and targeted approach,” said Lute, most recently the former United States Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s standing political body.

Time is short. Illinois is one of two states with the earliest primaries in the country, meaning its voters will go to the polls in March.

The white paper suggests the creation of a national digital network for local election officials to quickly share information about threats and incidents. This is in contrast to 2016, when officials in 21 states only learned they’d been targeted almost a year after the fact.

Next, every local and state election official should have a security officer on staff, to deal with these issues.

The paper then goes on to outline a standard list of the things any company would implement to protect the security of its networks, but which election officials have overall been slow to roll out because of a lack of funding, knowledge and awareness of the dangers.

The final suggestion is the idea that every election jurisdiction needs to come up with a plan about how it will recover if it is hacked. That could mean paper backups of voter registration lists, storing paper ballots or saving digital scans of ballots.

“If we detect breaches and recover from them quickly, we will survive. And so will our democracy,” the paper says.

“We could make dramatic inroads to secure our election systems. Which quite frankly may be more fundamental (to our security) than the next fighter plane.” Ambassador Douglas Lute