Though Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, other aspects of the election—from the way that Russia created a massive propaganda machine to target swing district voters, the hacks into state election systems, and attempts to alter voter rolls—are getting much less attention. Even when it appears that those attempts may have been successful, like efforts to scrub Democratic voters in North Carolina.
Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books—tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status … the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.
Local officials have put these problems down to human error—human error that demonstrably affected far more votes than anything Republicans have been show about “illegal voting.” Any effort to either discover the truth, or safeguard the system for the next election, seems to be limited.
After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.
A New York Times investigation shows that the attacks on state systems were more extensive, and more successful, than officials have previously disclosed.
Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.
Officials and intelligence agencies still believe that the actually tally of votes on election day was accurate, but that’s the only part of the election that seems to have gone unaffected. The security of voting rolls and state election systems is … up for grabs.
Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.
Not only has the federal government failed to look into the issues with state voter rolls, it appears that the companies supporting those rolls haven’t done so, either. That’s even true in areas where those rolls are known to have problems.
In Durham, a local firm with limited digital forensics or software engineering expertise produced a confidential report, much of it involving interviews with poll workers, on the county’s election problems. The report was obtained by The Times, and election technology specialists who reviewed it at the Times’ request said the firm had not conducted any malware analysis or checked to see if any of the e-poll book software was altered, adding that the report produced more questions than answers.
How the problems in that area affected the election isn’t clear, but imagine this scenario replicated over hundreds of districts in dozens of states.
North Carolina went for Donald J. Trump in a close election. But in Durham County, Hillary Clinton won 78 percent of the 156,000 votes, winning by a larger margin than President Barack Obama had against Mitt Romney four years earlier. … Voters gave up and left polling places in droves — there’s no way of knowing the numbers, but they include more than a hundred North Carolina Central University students facing four-hour delays.