NYTimes: Russia Hacking Claims Mount, But No Investigation

Evidence of Russian election hacking efforts continue to mount, but urgency to investigate it does not, the New York Times reported Friday.

Several counties on Election Day faced breakdowns, including Durham County in North Carolina, where many people were turned away at the ballot box, incorrectly told they had already voted days earlier or were ineligible to vote. Others were routed to a different polling place, but rejected once they arrived.

The problems, according to a National Security Agency report, started after Russian military intelligence successfully infiltrated VR systems, an election service provider in eight states, including key sites Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia.

An NSA analysis was unable to determine whether Russian hackers were successful in compromising votes, but the Times reported that there wasn’t a substantial investigation into the issues, at least in Durham, by county, state or federal officials, and election security and technology experts are still searching for answers.

“If you were looking to influence an election, one thing you could do is keep people from voting in a targeted county by monkeying with the e-pollbooks so people couldn’t check in, which would lead to long lines and chaos at the polls,” said Susan Greenhalgh, an election technology specialist who was fielding complaints from North Carolina on Election Day.

“This,” she said, referring to what she witnessed in Durham, “is exactly what that looked like.”

Michael Daniel, who served as cybersecurity coordinator in the White House under former President Barack Obama, told the Times there are major roadblocks in conducting such investigations.

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state. If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

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