“We’re fortunate in that we have paper ballots for all of our votes,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who is up for reelection this year, told POLITICO.
All New Hampshire voters vote with paper ballots, which they either mark by hand with pens or pencils or indirectly using touchscreen voting machines. Election workers in most polling places then run both kinds of ballots through scanning machines to count and record the votes, before transmitting that data to the central election office in Concord.
Roughly one-third of New Hampshire towns forgo the computerized scanners altogether and count their ballots by hand.
In addition, all polling places use printed registration lists to check in voters, rather than the tablets or laptops that have experienced mysterious failures in states such as North Carolina. (A few communities are pilot-testing tablets this year, Scanlan said, but they will still be required to maintain paper voter lists too.)
So we have nothing to worry about?
Not quite. New Hampshire still has some targets that are particularly vulnerable to hacking — the array of websites that local election offices use to report their own unofficial results. Tampering with those sites wouldn’t affect the official statewide totals but could set off widespread confusion about who really won the primary, similar to the feuding among Democrats about who prevailed in Iowa.
The state government doesn’t set any security requirements for these local government websites, which means some could be running vulnerable software or using outdated security certificates.
According to the security firm McAfee, 90 percent of county websites in the state don’t use a .gov domain name, a step that federal authorities recommend because it is a trusted sign of an official government resource. And 30 percent of counties lack a basic form of website encryption called “HTTPS” that protects web traffic from interception.
Jon Morgan, a Democratic New Hampshire state senator and cyber expert, said the “vast majority of our towns and municipalities are wide open to attack,” and that “we’re not doing nearly enough to take the threats seriously.”
“Those entities are really left to their own devices in order to make sure that they have protections in place,” said Morgan, the senior director of security operations at the cyber firm Area 1 Security.
He added that “the vast majority of our towns and municipalities are wide open to attack.”
Overseeing the local governments’ websites is “probably an area that we really haven’t thought much about,” Scanlan acknowledged. “It’s one of those areas that, at this point, has been a little further down the priority list.”
Still, he said, state officials do “stress generally the importance of cybersecurity” during training sessions for local election volunteers.
Source: politico.com
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