Did A Russian Hack Block People From Voting In Democratic County In North Carolina?
New report indicates Russian hack may be to blame for Durham County voter ‘glitch.’
On Election Day in 2016, one county in North Carolina experienced wide spread software glitches that resulted in voters being turned away and prevented from voting. These so-called glitches just so happened to take place in Durham County – a heavily Democratic country.
At the time the issues were thought to have been caused by software issues, however, a new report by The New York Times indicates that issues were actually the result of a Russian cyberattack.
Here is how The New York Times describes the chaos on Election Day, “Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.”
And a non-profit election monitoring group that was on the ground that day seems to think the issues were caused by a cyberattack. “It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” said Susan Greenhalgh who was trouble shooting in Durham on Election Day.
Voter registration system had been hacked by Russians
And it’s not just that the chaos seemed like a cyber attack. As the New York Times report notes, “the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.”
One would think that if you have proof of Russian hacking of the voter roll systems and widespread “glitches” on Election Day, that significant resources would have been dedicated to investigating the issue.
Unfortunately, if you think that, you’d be wrong.
As the New York Times reports:
After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.
The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times found.
And here is another frightening prospect. When U.S. intelligence concluded in January 2017 that the vote counts weren’t changed – they never said that the back end voter registration systems, like the one disrupted in Durham, weren’t used to block Americans from voting.
As the New York Times notes, “Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.”
So why hasn’t the issue been more thoroughly investigated by U.S. intelligence officials? According to the New York Times, “legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems.”
Read the full New York Times report here.
