WASHINGTON -- Spooked by Russian efforts to hack the 2016 presidential election, states around the country are trying to mount the most ambitious overhaul of the nation's election machinery and technology since the contested 2000 presidential vote.
Experts have warned for years that state and local election equipment and security practices were dangerously out of date, but the 2016 election laid bare the seriousness of the threat.
West Virginia's elections team has added a cybersecurity expert from the state National Guard with a top-secret federal security clearance. Colorado and Rhode Island will now verify election results via an advanced statistical procedure called a risk-limiting audit.
Delaware is moving its voter-registration list off the state's aging mainframe computer and preparing to replace a 21-year-old electronic voting system that does not leave a paper record of votes to be audited.
Last month, a panel of state, federal and private election experts completed a sweeping revision of guidelines for manufacturers of new voting equipment, the first major overhaul in a dozen years. While the guidelines are voluntary, they are endorsed by all but three states, so manufacturers effectively must meet the new standards to sell their equipment in most of the nation.
The effort to make the vote more secure is notably bipartisan and relatively rancor-free. Republicans are largely aligned with Democrats on the need to act before the next presidential election in 2020, and there is some support in both parties in Congress for helping to finance changes.
Federal officials have said they are confident that November's election results were not tampered with. But federal intelligence and security officials were so shaken by Russian attempts to compromise the vote that the Department of Homeland Security designated election systems a critical national infrastructure, like banking and the electrical grid, that merit special protection.
State election directors who were blindsided and angered by the Homeland Security Department's critical infrastructure designation will meet with department officials in Atlanta this month to discuss how they can share information about threats. The department also is working to give state election officials security clearances so they can view classified assessments of dangers to the election system.
The new guidelines for manufacturers of voting equipment -- reduced to five pages from more than 200 -- include for the first time principles as basic as a requirement that voting devices produce written records that can be verified, and that software or hardware errors cannot lead to undetectable changes in tallies. They are expected to spur the development of a new generation of cheaper and more secure equipment, said Matthew Masterson, the chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission.
He said the shared guidelines would allow for the deployment of election software on products like tablets and iPads, which could be ready as soon as the 2020 election, rather than force 50 states to put together their own systems. "It's going to drive innovation, hopefully save money for election officials, and allow us to test and certify equipment more efficiently," Masterson said.
For all the expressions of resolve, money remains the biggest obstacle to a complete overhaul of the system. Many jurisdictions rely on equipment bought after the 2002 Help America Vote Act, Congress' response to the problems exposed by the 2000 presidential election, allotted nearly $4 billion for new machines and other reforms. Many of those machines are at or past the end of their service lives; Georgia conducted November's elections on voting machines running Windows 2000, and parts of Pennsylvania relied on Windows XP.
Most states still use paper ballots that are counted by hand or by machines. But four other states besides Delaware -- Louisiana, Georgia, New Jersey and South Carolina -- use paperless systems that leave no audit trail, as do large swaths of Pennsylvania and some other states. Virginia scrapped thousands of paperless voting machines in 2015 after discovering that even an amateur hacker could easily and secretly change vote tallies.
A number of states and jurisdictions are replacing old equipment, and Los Angeles County -- with 5.3 million registered voters, the nation's largest election district -- has designed an election system from scratch, and is asking manufacturers to bid on supplying it.
Bipartisan legislation in the House and Senate would provide a modest amount of federal money for new machines. But prospects for passage are uncertain, and many states are unable or unwilling to fill the breach.
But even states that cannot afford more secure machines are taking steps to harden their election systems and bolster public confidence in the vote.
South Carolina has accepted an offer of free "cyberhygiene" scans of its system by Homeland Security experts. Colorado is upgrading its voting equipment, but it has also begun to receive Homeland Security screenings, added national guard security experts to its election team and tacked a basic security measure onto its voter-registration database: two-step authentication for anyone seeking to log into the system.
A Section on 10/15/2017