During a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson said that his department was “actively thinking about election security,” and considering granting voting systems new federal protections.
Secretary Johnson’s comments, which were first reported by BuzzFeed News, suggest that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could soon classify the myriad of voting machines in use across the nation as “critical infrastructure.”
DHS currently identifies 16 critical infrastructure sectors in the US that receive enhanced cybersecurity assistance from the federal government. They include financial institutions, energy plants, and transportation systems.
The department also designates certain commercial sector facilities like casinos, movie and television studios, and professional sports leagues as critical infrastructure.
Electoral systems, however, are not under the same classification. And bringing them into the fold could prove exceedingly complicated given the localized nature of elections in the US.
Administering the ballot has traditionally been left up to state and local officials, creating thousands of different jurisdictions overseeing elections in the country. That would mean, Johnson as noted, that the department would have to work with “states, cities, counties, who all have their own way of doing business, down to the nature of the ballots, the nature of how votes are collected and tabulated.”
He said that such an undertaking would likely require “longer term investments,” but that the department hopes to soon send out cybersecurity guidance and best practices to election officials.
Unease over the integrity of US elections has grown considerably in recent weeks since the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Although the federal government hasn’t formally identified who was behind the cyber intrusion, private security firms have fingered Russian intelligence services as the likely culprit.
The subsequent release of thousands of internal DNC emails by Wikileaks has led many, including Hillary Clinton herself, to allege that Russia is attempting to manipulate the election in favor of the GOP nominee Donald Trump.
The public dump also again piqued interest in the reliability of aging voting machines that in many cases rely on easily hackable wireless connections to transmit vote information. As recently as last summer, thousands of WinVote systems in use by the state of Virginia were decommissioned because of vulnerabilities.
WIRED quoted a security researcher who said of the machines, “anyone within a half mile could have modified every vote, undetected” without “any technical expertise.”
The tech outlet also noted: “The WinVote systems are an extreme case, but not an isolated one. Other voting machine models have potentially vulnerable wireless components; Virginia’s just the only one where a test proved how bad the situation was.”
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than forty states are planning this November to use electronic voting machines that are at least ten years old.
In April, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) introduced legislation that would appropriate $125 million in grants for states to upgrade aging voting machines.
“This bill is based on more than 10 months of in-depth independent research, and interviews with more than 100 election officials and specialists in all 50 states that indicate our outdated voting machines pose an impending crisis,” Johnson said in a statement.
