More than 60 state and local election offices last year asked the Department of Homeland Security for help protecting their election systems from cyber intrusions.
According to a Department of Homeland Security memo issued to Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., 33 states and 36 localities asked for a free assessment of their election systems to stop cyberattacks before the 2016 election. Another two states and six local governments asked for an assessment after the election, CNN reported.
The memo explained that many states and cities were worried about the risk of hacks last year, before the Obama administration confirmed Russian hackers were attempting to interfere in the election.
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI told the Senate Intelligence Committee in June that Russian hackers targeted election systems in 21 states, but said hackers did not change any vote tallies.
The memo from the Department of Homeland Security didn’t say how many of the 21 states that were targeted requested a cyber assessment, but reaffirmed that Russian actors didn’t target vote tallying systems.
“There are no indications nor observed evidence of Russian actors using cyber or physical means to target voting systems, which include voting machines (the electronic machines used by voters to cast ballots) and vote tallying systems (the electronic machines used by election officials to count and tally marked ballots),” the memo said. “These voting systems should not have active connections to the Internet during the voting process, and are rarely, if ever connected to the Internet at all.”
In January, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced election systems would be declared “critical infrastructure,” which made election infrastructure a priority for cybersecurity assistance and protections. The decision initially received pushback from people concerned about a federal takeover of elections.
The Department of Homeland Security said in its memo that it has “no plans to make any changes to the designation of election infrastructure as a critical infrastructure subsector.”
