Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has declined to bring election security bills to the Senate floor. That includes a bill introduced last May by Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California and 2020 presidential hopeful, that aimed to mandate new cybersecurity standards, including hand-marked paper ballots, for all federal elections.
This week, a Texas county said it would use paperless voting systems for 2020, a move that some experts have criticized as insecure. Officials in Taylor County defended the move on Monday, saying there were no state or federal mandates that counties use paper backups. They added that the new machines were “highly secure” and had “no remote access.”
Mr. Felten and other security experts said weak points in those systems could easily be exploited. Many companies that maintain such machines, and manage software upgrades to them, are mom-and-pop shops that lack the sophistication to monitor or deflect serious threats.
Such attacks are not just hypothetical. Americans still lack a clear understanding of the impact successful Russian attacks had on the 2016 election. Both the special counsel report and leaked National Security Agency documents show that Russian hackers infiltrated the United States’ vast back-end election apparatus, including voter registration databases and electronic pollbook vendors, in 2016.
Among the vendors hacked, N.S.A. documents revealed, was VR Systems, a Florida company that sells electronic check-in systems to states like North Carolina, which experienced significant pollbook failures in Democratic-leaning counties on Election Day.
Now, 16 months from the 2020 election, it is still unclear what, if anything, Russian hackers did with that access in 2016. VR Systems consistently denies its systems were sabotaged. Last April, after the special counsel’s report on election interference, North Carolina state officials acknowledged that they lacked “the necessary technical expertise to forensically analyze the computers.” The Department of Homeland Security started an examination of North Carolina’s 2016 election equipment last month.