The top election official in Maine says the Department of Homeland Security needs to stay out of the election business.
“Homeland Security drives me nuts,” Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap told the Washington Examiner.
Dunlap’s opinion is a preview of what Congress is expected to hear next week, when it moves away from the question of whether top Trump administration officials colluded with Russia, and starts looking at how to secure America’s voting systems from foreign attacks.
In the last days of the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued a controversial directive that classified voting systems as “critical infrastructure,” which gave the DHS some regulatory power over those systems. Johnson is sure to face questions about that decision, and DHS activities in the run up to the 2016 vote, in a hearing next week at the House Intelligence Committee.
But not everyone at the state level is happy with how DHS has handled this new responsibility. Last week, a classified document from the NSA was leaked and published by The Intercept, which appeared to show that there were broader attacks from Russian military intelligence on local election systems than originally thought.
Dunlap said DHS never bothered to tell anyone.
“When this leak happened, I know a lot of secretaries [of state] were alarmed, I was alarmed by it,” Dunlap told the Washington Examiner. “But what was alarming was not the idea that you’ve suffered a cyber attack — that’s the reality in the digital world. But the thing that was alarming was they hadn’t told anybody. And really had no plans to tell anybody.”
Even before that problem, the National Association of Secretaries of State said they opposed the “critical infrastructure” designation. And after the leaked memo was published, NASS used the opportunity apparently to try to goad DHS into sharing its information.
“We urge DHS and other federal law enforcement to share threat intelligence information with election officials and notify all local election officials who were targeted in the email spear-phishing campaign that is documented in the NSA report,” the association said in a statement a day after The Intercept published the document. “This type of information-sharing was a key justification for the Department of Homeland Security’s January 2017 designation of election infrastructure as critical infrastructure.”
Dunlap’s communications director, Kristen Muszynski, confirmed that DHS said in a conference call earlier this week that it had reached out to all of the victims of the cyberattacks referenced in the leaked memo, but that they would not be identifying who the victims were.
The vulnerability of the voting systems in each state varies depending to what degree the state’s information is digitally integrated into other state systems, and to what degree all of those systems are online.
Maine, for example, still uses a paper ballot system, and tallies the vote with vote-counting machines that aren’t online.
“Communication [from DHS] is just non-existent,” Dunlap added. “I’ve worked with the federal government enough. It’s one of those strange things, they think they know a hell of a lot more than we do. Even though they’ve never done any of this stuff. They’ve never run an election, they’ve never issued a driver’s license.”
While the various secretaries of state have wrestled with DHS, Dunlap notes there’s still a big shoe to drop.
“The jury’s still out on where Trump could come down on all of this,” he said.
