Here & Now

Noon Wednesday with guest Meagan Wolfe

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to “Noon Wednesday,” I’m Marisa Wojcik, a multimedia journalist with “Here & Now” from Wisconsin Public Television. Joining me here today is Meagan Wolfe. She is the interim administrator for the Wisconsin Elections Commission and she’s here to tell us about the status of election security and integrity in Wisconsin. Meagan, thanks for joining us.

Meagan Wolfe:

Great, thanks so much for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, you’ve been the interim administrator for a few months now, but before that you were working on election security with the Commission.

Meagan Wolfe:

Right

Marisa Wojcik:

So just to start, if someone is walking into their polling place, what’s the difference between them casting a paper ballot or using an electronic voting machine?

Meagan Wolfe:

Sure, well there actually isn’t a whole lot of difference when it comes to election security. First of all, I think it’s really important to start with every single piece of voting equipment that is used in the state of Wisconsin is certified by the federal government, as well as a rigorous protocol through the state government. That being said, there are a few different looks and feels in ways to interact with that equipment. One is with our tabulators and using an actual paper ballot. So these are the polling places where you walk in and you get a paper ballot, you mark it, and then you feed that ballot into a tabulator. Eighty-five percent of our polling places use that method, 85 percent of the ballots are cast that way. The other way is through what’s called a DRE machine. Now this is where you’re actually touching the screen to make your selections, but even those machines have a paper audit trail. So when you make those selections on the screen you’re still going to see an actual paper receipt that’s shows who you voted for. And then the last five percent of ballots that are cast in Wisconsin, those are just cast on a paper ballot. They’re not fed through any type of machine. So those are the three different ways in the state of Wisconsin, but every way has a paper trail for the voter to verify how they voted.

Marisa Wojcik:

And the paper trail with the electronic machine the voter sees the ballot and the vote that they cast.

Meagan Wolfe:

They do, so they can actually verify what they pressed on the screen before that vote is actually tabulated. So there’s a paper that looks kind of like a receipt that is on the machine that you can actually look at, make sure that it made your selection correctly before that vote is cast.

Marisa Wojcik:

So Wisconsin recently received seven million dollars for the “Help America Vote Act.” What are we spending that money on?

Meagan Wolfe:

Yeah, so these additional funds come at a time when we’re in the middle of implementing a lot of really important security measures. At our last Elections Commission meeting, we proposed a plan to our commission with a two-phase approach. The first phase is to look at what are some of our immediate security needs and concerns. A lot of our challenges that we face right now aren’t necessarily funding issues, they’re more or less resource issues. Having enough people to implement some of the measures that we need to secure elections here in Wisconsin. One of the biggest things is making sure that we have enough people working on these issues. Here in Wisconsin we have the most decentralized election system in the country. That means that while other states operate their elections at the county level, so they might have 50-70 clerks that are involved in administering elections here in Wisconsin we have 1853 municipal clerks, each running their own election. So what that means is there are a lot of follow up pieces, there are a lot of training resources that we have to develop at the state level to make sure that almost 2000 people are trained on those issues.

Marisa Wojcik:

How are you staying on top of that many people? How is that training being rolled out?

Meagan Wolfe:

Sure.

Marisa Wojcik:

And how is that being communicated with that many people at once?

Meagan Wolfe:

So fortunately we’ve gotten really good at working within that system and having really concrete sort of mechanisms to make sure that they get those trainings. So we have a couple different ways that we’re working with our municipalities as well as our counties to get them training. One is we have a really robust online learning center with interactive tutorials. What we’re doing there is we’re actually establishing sort of a baseline curriculum of election security and general cyber security, best practices and tutorials that all of our 1853 clerks as well as our county clerks will have to take before they’ll even have access to our statewide system. Another is we’re actually going to be doing some in person training. We were fortunate enough to have our counties actually partner with us to be regional trainers. What we’re going to do is we’re going to go out in the month of June and here at the end of May and train some of those counties on how to conduct in person election security trainings. It’s even going to include what’s called a tabletop exercise, so this is where you actually practice scenarios that could happen in an Election Day event. So those county clerks are then going to serve as those regional representatives to train all the 1853 municipal clerks in person on these very important topics and how to respond in the event of an emergency, an election security emergency, and how to prevent one from happening to start with.

Marisa Wojcik:

Is that eliminate the human variable in the security component?

Meagan Wolfe:

Well, you know, I actually think that in a lot of ways that human variable is what also makes our system strong. So a lot of these small municipalities, because they are so small, they have a really personal connection with their voters, so if something unusual happens, they’re going to see that, whereas with a larger jurisdiction, it’s harder to know exactly if there’s some type of an anomaly going on in your numbers.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, each municipality has their own electronic voting equipment that they choose and it is under a list of certified equipment?

Meagan Wolfe:

Right

Marisa Wojcik:

The Senate intelligence committee released a report last week saying that they have concerns about cyber security practices from the vendors of these election voting equipment and software. They say that vendors abiding by security guidelines is voluntary? What does that mean and does that concern you at all?

Meagan Wolfe:

So, all of the equipment again in Wisconsin we do go through the certification process through the federal government and then we actually have our own certification process in the state of Wisconsin so I think that we feel very confident about the measures that a piece of equipment has to go through before we feel comfortable implementing it that in the state. That being said, it’s a constantly evolving sort of field as DHS and as the EAC come up with more best-practices about ways we should be maybe screening vendors or screening additional measures, those are certainly things we will take into consideration as we expand our plan.

Marisa Wojcik:

So you have said that we were scanned, Wisconsin was scanned in 2016, but that it was basically a, “Hey, we’re checking things out” and no, nothing was infiltrated, but some have said that was a practice run? Does that worry you and how are we staying steps ahead?

Meagan Wolfe:

Sure, well I actually think in that particular case where there were scans of our state enterprise that were blocked, that actually shows how strong our state enterprise system is. Those scans were actually blocked proactively by our state enterprise before they were even identified as a malicious actor. Again, those never got past our firewalls and never got kind of past that outer layer of protection into our systems. So I think we can feel really good about the measures we already have in place. That being said, every day we’re receiving new resources, new information, we’re continuing to collaborate with our division enterprise technology here in Wisconsin as well as Homeland Security to see what we can do beyond those successful measures that we already have in place. So, I think that although there was a lot of sort of hype around that scanning attempt, it was actually really a success story at the end of the day in showing how strong our enterprise really is.

Marisa Wojcik:

And what about the difference between scanning the voting system versus the voter registration and the voter rolls? Are you guys concerned about people being removed from the voter rolls?

Meagan Wolfe:

Sure, and I think that’s a really important distinction and a lot of times those two things really get conflated, so we have our voting equipment in the polling places that is not connected to the internet that is kind of a stand-alone system that has a lot of error gap processes in place to protect it. And then there’s the statewide voter registration system. So that’s a system housed at the state that our municipalities and our counties use to enter their election related information. And we’re able to protect that system in the state enterprise and make sure that we are guardians of that information. Every single move that’s made in our statewide voter registration system, every single data character that’s changed, we have a log of that, we’re able to see every piece of information that’s changed and to identify any type of anomalies. That paired with the protections and the scans that we receive from Homeland Security as well as DET really makes us feel confident that we are able to have a very comprehensive picture of exactly what’s going on in our system.

Marisa Wojcik:

And the system is going to be reviewed soon, correct?

Meagan Wolfe:

Yeah, so we are always working with Homeland Security and have been since I believe 2015 or 2016 to have routine scans of the system to make sure that we are doing everything that we can and we do not have any vulnerabilities. We are going to be engaging with Homeland Security as well as our state enterprise in the next couple of weeks and months to do even more additional, more intensive tests of our system to make sure that we don’t have any vulnerabilities and if we do that those are addressed before the August and the November elections. There are also some assessments they are able to do to proactively, or, I’m sorry, retroactively take a look at our systems to make sure that there weren’t any changes or there aren’t any things like dormant files that are sitting on our system right now.

Marisa Wojcik:

And so speaking of DHS, you have the same security clearance that your predecessor had, is that right?

Meagan Wolfe:

So yes, right now I have what’s called interim secret security clearance through Homeland Security.

Marisa Wojcik:

And has that, since you’ve taken over, has that given you any inside information?

Meagan Wolfe:

Sure, what it’s allowed me to do is to get a little more context behind some of the information that’s publicly available but it hasn’t caused us to change our course of action at all, it just allows me to sort of know the background about why we are making certain decisions.

Marisa Wojcik:

Lastly, how does Wisconsin compare to other states?

Meagan Wolfe:

Well, I don’t think that there’s any really perfect metrics as far as that’s concerned but we have heard from a lot of our election security partners that we are pretty ahead of the game. This is something that we’ve been paying attention to for a while now, something that I know our commission takes very seriously, and it’s something that we are constantly making moves on, and so I think that we’re well positioned, but I also think that other states are well positioned and I see this as a partnership between all of us to make sure that we’re protecting not just our state elections, but elections across the country and people’s confidence that they can trust the process.

Marisa Wojcik:

Meagan, thank you so much for joining us.

Meagan Wolfe:

Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Marisa Wojcik:

If you like this interview, please share it and we want to hear from you, so please leave your comments below. For more from “Here & Now” and Wisconsin Public Television please visit wpt.org and thanks for joining us on “Noon Wednesday.”