Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson denied on Thursday that he was seeking to nationalize the election by taking cybersecurity away from local jurisdictions, chalking the allegations up to “chatter on the Internet.”
“It would be … very difficult, through any sort of cyberintrusion, to alter the ballot account, simply because it is so decentralized and so vast,” Johnson told a gathering at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. “You’ve got state governments, local governments, county governments involved in the election process.
Johnson in August said he hoped the federal government would consider classifying systems in the nation’s more than 9,000 electoral jurisdictions as critical infrastructure, similar to the power grid or financial sector.
“We are concerned about bad cyberactors generally. State hackers, hacktivists, criminals that intrude into the presence of state officials generally,” he said Thursday. “So we’re offering assistance to these officials in terms of cyberhygiene.
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“There’s a lot of chatter on the Internet about what that could mean. It does not mean a federal takeover of state elections … we don’t have authority to do that,” Johnson said. “I’ve been trying to educate state officials about what we’re able [and] in a position to offer them.”
In August, hackers reportedly breached election systems in Illinois, successfully taking personal information on more than 200,000 voters, while attempting to hack another system in Arizona.
