Here & Now

Threats to Wisconsin Elections Past and Present

Frederica Freyberg:

A first look this week at new information about the external threat to Wisconsin elections. Wisconsin is and has been a key swing state in recent elections. Security experts are warning they have proof the voting systems can be hacked. Even machines not connected to the internet can be breached. However, state and local election officials say don’t worry. Grigor Atanesian, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, is a Fullbright scholar and an Edmund S. Muskie fellow at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. He joins us this week with his findings and thanks very much for being here.

Grigor Atanesian:

Thanks for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

Really amazing reporting, so we thank you for bringing it to us. But with the primary weeks away and the 2018 midterms months away, how real, according to your reporting, are threats from Russia to the election system in Wisconsin?

Grigor Atanesian:

So the U.S. Intelligence community says that the midterms are under threat, a possible target. Trump Administration, I mean the Department of Homeland Security say it is a possible target.

Frederica Freyberg:

What does your reporting show about what Russia was already kind of able to target in Wisconsin in 2016?

Grigor Atanesian:

So there are two different issues. One is election systems and another is the whole environment and information around it. So Russians didn’t do much in terms of tampering votes. They tried to breach, actually they didn’t breach, the service of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. We assume it was a mistake. They targeted the Wisconsin Elections Commission but just had the wrong address. So that’s it in terms of hacking the voting system per se. But Wisconsin was a target of a very sophisticated misinformation campaign, together with Pennsylvania and other key, sort of battleground swing states. This campaign tapped into divisive issues like race or guns or minority rights. And, for example, there was a Twitter account which was called, titled Milwaukee Voice, and it was styled as a local news outlet. It is now deactivated but if you go on Twitter and look it up, you can see the replies to it are still on. So people were believing it’s a local news outlet and people were replying, “Oh, what a crazy story” and stuff like that. So this was huge in Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

Our election officials here in Wisconsin always say that things are secure because the system is so decentralized, like local clerks run the elections. But do experts you talked with say that that keeps the system safe from cyber attack?

Grigor Atanesian:

So the experts do admit that this diversity and decentralization is a strength, but they warn in a close race, and there’s a lot of close races in Wisconsin, it’s not a safeguard, because you don’t need to hack all the systems around the state. You only need to hack some machines, right? And we know there was in 2011 there was a race which had a local county clerk made a mistake. They forgot — he say they lost some 14,000 votes and the race outcome was a Supreme Court race. It was changed. So you only need to hack some systems.

Frederica Freyberg:

What about the fact that we use paper ballots not connected to the internet? We’re told that that is a safeguard.

Grigor Atanesian:

That is definitely a safeguard, and Wisconsin is very happy to have it. All the experts say that it is a strength. But the big problems is they also say that it’s not enough. The paper shouldn’t be for show. That’s what experts say. You need to check it. You need to verify the outcome.

Frederica Freyberg:

And that has everything to do with kind of post-election audits; is that right?

Grigor Atanesian:

That’s correct. So to be completely clear here, Wisconsin has post-election audits, but they are not to verify the outcome. They just check if the whole equipment functioned properly. Once again, national intelligence and security community says that’s not enough.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what would be the effect of a post-election audit? How would that help the election integrity in the state of Wisconsin?

Grigor Atanesian:

So whatever happens if the election is hacked or there is a human error or there is a program error, it will see immediately, before you verify and before you certify the election outcome. So whatever happens before you certify the election and send possibly the wrong result, you find out what happened.

Frederica Freyberg:

And is there a move in Wisconsin to move toward these kinds of post-election audits?

Grigor Atanesian:

Well, in our interview the Wisconsin Election Commission’s interim administrator Meagan Wolfe said that her staff recently traveled to Colorado, where this kind of post-election audit is already implemented, and they said that they are thinking of implementing it in a framework of an existing law. And it will be on the agenda of their meeting in September.

Frederica Freyberg:

Okay. So too late for any kind of primary coming up next month, obviously. But there’s some other issues as well. We use optical scanners with our paper ballots. Are those hackable?

Grigor Atanesian:

So the experts say that saying that something is unhackable is just wrong. It’s a myth. Every piece of equipment on earth is hackable. You just need to know what kind of vulnerabilities it has. The problem is one of the problems is the voting machines are being produced and serviced by private vendors.

Frederica Freyberg:

Right. And that includes those touch screen machines that are used for people with disabilities in what, like, three or four counties in Wisconsin?

Grigor Atanesian:

That’s frankly– that is an issue. It’s not quite big of an issue because very little number of voters use them. But yes. These machines were proven to be hackable recently.

Frederica Freyberg:

You know, it seems to me that there’s two camps here. Some say people are sounding the alarm unnecessarily, this is totally overblown, this threat. And others are saying, no, the threat is actually being downplayed. So what have you found in your reporting about where we actually stand as to whether or not Wisconsin is potentially, you know, at real jeopardy for its system being hacked into?

Grigor Atanesian:

This is a good question. I feel like the consensus among the experts is that we shouldn’t be really alarmed and we shouldn’t be worried and people should go out and vote. But the officials should adopt any best practice which is recommended, like post-election audits.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We need to leave it there. Thank you very much. Excellent reporting.

Grigor Atanesian:

Thanks for having me, Frederica.

Frederica Freyberg:

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reporting about election integrity appears online and in newspapers across the state this Sunday.