Election security

Republican efforts questioning the outcome of the 2020 presidential race have led to voting system breaches that election security experts say pose a heightened risk to future elections.

President Trump fired Chris Krebs, who headed election cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday after he debunked claims of fraud and hacking in the election. Nellie Gorbea, the Rhode Island secretary of state and an expert on election security, told LX News that his firing poses a danger to our country that goes beyond the election.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar spoke to reporters Thursday about where the battleground state’s elections officials are in the ballot-counting process. Boockvar also dismissed any possibility of widespread voter fraud and stressed the security of Pennsylvania’s election system.

The Secretary of the State said Connecticut’s voter list gets a million pings a day from illicit IP addresses mining for data.  “They want the data that’s in these lists but you can’t tell which ones are bad actors and which ones are just doing it for commercial purposes.  It’s really a needle in a haystack,” explained Connecticut Secretary...

Connecticut’s election officials say they are working to keep local voting systems secure to protect them from hackers.

The expansion of absentee voting due to the pandemic has more than quadrupled the number of people voting that way in Connecticut compared to the last presidential election. The state said more than 567,000 voters have returned absentee ballots so far in Connecticut. It has left some to ask – how will election officials prevent people from using absentee ballots…

Election Day is only a week away and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal and Connecticut Secretary of the State Denise Merrill discussed election security on Tuesday. The discussion comes as intelligence officials continue to “sound the alarm on foreign election interference by Russia and others,” state officials said in a release. Blumenthal said he hopes he is wrong,...

Intelligence officials have confirmed that Russia and Iran are actively working to meddle in the upcoming U.S. election. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray said Iran and Russia have obtained voter information, and that Iran was behind recent emails to Florida voters urging them to switch parties and vote Republican.

With 28.1 million votes already cast, nearly five times the number of people have voted so far in the 2020 election than at this time in 2016. NBCLX storyteller Chase Cain explains what this surge in early voting means for the presidential race.

The move comes weeks before the presidential election and as President Donald Trump continues to downplay the severity of foreign interference.

The FBI is committing to inform state officials if local election systems have been breached. That’s according to federal officials. The FBI in the past would alert local governments about attacks on their electoral systems without automatically sharing that information with the state. That meant that state officials could be left in the dark and in a position of certifying...