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Page 6 The Skanner February 14, 2018 News Federal Vote-Protection Efforts Lag Ahead of First Primaries By Frank Bajak and Christina A. Cassidy Associated Press ith the first primaries of the 2018 elec- tions less than a month away, you might expect federal officials to be wrapping up efforts to safeguard the vote against expected Russian interference. You’d be wrong. Federal efforts to help states button down elections systems have crawled, hamstrung in part by wariness of fed- eral meddling. Just 14 states and three local election agencies have so far asked for detailed vulnerability assess- ments offered by the De- partment of Homeland Security — and only five of the two-week exam- inations are complete. Illinois, for instance — W one of two states where voter registration data- bases were breached in 2016 — requested an as- sessment in January and is still waiting. Primary voters go to the polls there March 20; state of- ficials can’t say whether the assessment will hap- pen beforehand. DHS says the assessments should be finished by mid-April. Meantime, fewer than half of the estimated 50 senior state elections officials who requested federal security clear- ances have received them, DHS says. That can hinder information sharing designed to help states deal with election disruptions. And Congress is still sitting on three bipar- tisan bills that address election integrity issues, including funding to up- grade antiquated equip- ment. Overall, experts say far too little has been done to shore up a vulnerable mishmash of 10,000 U.S. voting jurisdictions that mostly run on obsolete and imperfectly secured technology. Russian agents targeted elec- tion systems in 21 states ahead of the 2016 general election, DHS says, and separately launched a so- cial media blitz aimed at inflaming social tensions and sowing confusion. The CIA director and two other top U.S. intel- ligence officials told the Senate Tuesday they’ve seen indications Russian agents are preparing a new round of election subterfuge. The secre- tary of state has said the same. Texas will hold the first primary of 2018 on March 6; Illinois follows two weeks later. That makes local elec- AP PHOTO/MATT ROURKE, FILE Experts say too little has been done to shore up a vulnerable mishmash of 10,000 U.S. voting jurisdictions In this Oct. 14, 2016, file photo, a technician works to prepare voting machines to be used in the upcoming presidential election in Philadelphia. Since last July, a bipartisan team at Harvard, including former U.S. Marine and Army cyberwarriors, national security eggheads and Google engineers, has been looking into how to safeguard the vote against interference. The group drafted its latest protect-the-vote election “playbooks” intended to prepare state and local officials for the worst. tion officials “the front lines of the information age,” said Eric Rosen- bach, co-director of Har- vard’s Belfer Center and a former Defense Depart- ment chief of staff in the “ 2016 Clinton campaign, which was stung by mul- tiple email thefts later traced to Russian agents. “The question is: ‘How resilient are we and what are we doing to protect It’s not a question of wheth- er somebody is going to try to breach the system. The question is: ‘How resilient are we and what are we do- ing to protect ourselves? Obama administration. “After what the Russians did, every other bad guy is going to come after our democracy now.” Since last July, a bipar- tisan team at Harvard — including former U.S. Marine and Army cy- berwarriors, national security eggheads and Google engineers — has been trying to shore up that local line. The group, which calls itself the Defending Digital Democracy initiative, has just drafted its latest protect-the-vote election “playbooks” intended to prepare state and local officials for the worst. “It’s not a question of whether somebody is going to try to breach the system,” said Robby Mook, manager of the ourselves?’” Mook helps run the ef- fort with Matt Rhoades, who managed Mitt Rom- ney’s 2012 presidential run. Over six months, the authors visited 34 state and county offices and ran simulations to help local officials improve their “threat awareness.” The team’s find- ings highlight re- source-strapped election systems that can’t secure their own operations, vulnerable voting-equip- ment vendors and the threat posed by insiders and people looking for political advantage. There’s no evidence that any hack in the No- vember 2016 election affected election results. But there are also cases — such as in Georgia, where a key election-staging server was exposed on the open internet for months then wiped clean without a forensic exam — that haven’t been inde- pendently investigated. And federal delays are legion. In the last elec- tion, DHS took nearly a year to inform the af- fected states of hacking attempts, blaming it in part on a lack of security clearances. But it hasn’t made up enough lost ground to satisfy critics on Capitol Hill. In Illinois, for instance, the executive director of the state elections board submitted his applica- tion in August and has yet to receive his clear- ance, according to agen- cy spokesman Matt Diet- rich. As a stopgap, DHS is providing one-day “read-ins” on secret in- formation this week in Washington to about 100 senior state officials — secretaries of state and elections directors — gathered there for a meeting. “That’s a way to deal with the fact that the process hasn’t worked as quickly as we’d hoped,” Bob Kolasky, deputy as- sistant secretary at DHS for infrastructure pro- See VOTE on page 15 A career you can be proud of. Being a carpenter isn’t just a job. It’s a way of life. We’re devoted to strengthening the lives of our members with steady work, wealth and personal growth. We take a stand for our members and all workers. We work together to lead the building industry in safety, training and compensation. We create rich lives for our members and partners. To learn more about becoming a union carpenter, go to NWCarpenters.org. 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