Scott Powers
A new article in POLITICO Magazine explores how a 2016 elections problem in North Carolina may be traced to an elections software company doing business with most Florida counties that could have been exposed to a possible elections hacking.
The lengthy investigative report, “How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election?” by POLITICO contributor Kim Zetter, explains how Durham County, N.C., encountered voter database downloading problems just before the 2016 election day, involving software provided by Tallahassee-based VR Solutions, a company the article also reports had been targeted by Russian hackers in the 2016 election.
The Durham County Board of Elections was having trouble downloading voter information onto flash drives that were to be used at polling places, according to the story. POLITICO reported that the board asked VR Solutions for help, and the company remotely accessed the county’s voter network, and the downloads were completed.
But ultimately, it didn’t work. Almost immediately, the story reports, a number of the laptops using the data at polling places started having problems on election day.
“Some crashed or froze. Others indicated that voters had already voted when they hadn’t. Others displayed an alert saying voters had to show ID before they could vote, even though a recent court case in North Carolina had made that unnecessary,” Zetter reported.
The state ordered Durham County officials to abandon the laptops and use paper printouts to identify voters.
Later, according to several government reports cited by POLITICO, it was determined that, “VR Systems had been targeted by Russian hackers in a phishing campaign three months before the election. The hackers had sent malicious emails both to VR Systems and to some of its election customers, attempting to trick the recipients into revealing usernames and passwords for their email accounts. The Russians had also visited VR Systems’ website, presumably looking for vulnerabilities they could use to get into the company’s network,” the story reports.
“VR Systems has long insisted that none of its employees fell for the Russian phishing scam and that none of its systems were hacked. As for the Durham poll books, the county commissioned an investigation into the problems with its laptops and determined that the issues there were probably due to errors by poll workers and election staff,” the story continues.
But, “state election officials say Durham County’s investigation was incomplete and inconclusive,” the article continues, adding that a third-party forensic investigation did not take place until months later, giving potential hackers plenty of time to get back into the systems and erase any of their tracks.
POLITiCO reported that VR Systems’ voter software is used in 64 or Florida’s 67 counties, including Broward County, which had its own election day software problems in 2016. The software also is used in numerous other states besides Florida and North Carolina.
VR Systems told POLITICO that it hired a third-party global cyber security firm to analyze what happened in 2016, and received the conclusion that the company suffered no hacker intrusions into its network. A company spokesman acknowledged that the company had been targeted by Russian hackers, as had been previously disclosed, but disputed that VR Systems is the hacked elections software company referenced as “U.S. COMPANY 1” in government reports.
